Search Engine Optimisation: How Accurate are Keyword Tools?
By David Touri
In search engine optimisation, it is a crucial element to select the right keywords when optimising a website. The obvious reason being, if you have keywords with no search volume, you will not receive any traffic. Secondly, if you have keywords that are too competitive, you will find it very difficult (almost impossible) to win high ranks. So how do we find the in between balance for both obstacles? This is where tools would come into place, but how accurate are they?
To start, the main research tools that are found on the market today are Wordtracker, Overture Tool and Trellian Discovery. Now I bet many of you are pulling your hair out over which keywords are going to be suitable for optimisation. What makes it probably even more stressful is the varying results between the three different tools i.e. one tool may show a particular to be very good, while another tool may suggest a whole different result for the same keyword. Well stop stressing right now! The truth is that we don’t really know how accurate these tools are and we should only use their search volume figures as an indication as to whether a is popular amongst search engine users.
Let’s say a phrase, “dog products”, has a search volume of 5,000 searches per month on the Overture Tool. To make an assumption that “dog products” is a good for optimisation, based ONLY on the Overture figure, would be a very bad assumption. However, it gives us a rough idea of the search volume for that particular keyword. The next step would be to use Wordtracker or Discovery to see if a similar amount of search volume is present for “dog products” (remember to convert searches for each tool to a common time frame i.e. monthly or daily). If we have a very low search volume in BOTH Wordtracker and Discovery, then I would be very skeptical about using “dog products” for optimisation. The whole idea is to get at least two of the three tools to reflect reasonable / high search volumes before considering that to be suitable for optimisation. If you have all three tools returning reasonable / high search volumes for “dog products”, then the chances are that this is reasonable / high in search volume and definitely worth considering for optimisation.
Once a good set of keywords have been agreed upon through the use of the tools, you should then focus on the keywords that have a low / reasonable amount of competing web pages. There is no point trying to compete for a that has 1,000,000 web pages in competition for it. If you are good at SEO then you could achieve high ranks for that keyword, but it would require a lot of time and investment which could be spent on better things.
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