eCommerce Analytics

A well known SEO and SEM strategy for smaller retailers is to dominate niche long-tail keywords instead of competing head to head with big merchants for popular phrases. So instead of trying to rank for blu ray player, a better strategy might be to research keywords that have less competition (say, cheap blu ray player) and try to own those instead. But what happens when popular tools used for this type of keyword research have flaws that raise questions about the validity of their results?

Two of the most common tools for keyword research are free and come from Google itself: the creatively named Keyword Tool and a newer offering, Google Insights for Search. Both tools, more or less, report search volume for a given set of keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool provides an estimated absolute number of searches for a term while Google Insights provides a relative normalized value that makes sense only when compared to other terms or past data.

The problem is that the data in each tool is, more often than not, is contradictory.

Let’s consider our search for Blu-Ray players. First, here’s what the Keyword Tool has to say about the search volume for blu ray player:

The phrase match volume is 1,830,000 while the broad match volume is 4,090,000.

What does Google Insights tells us about the keyword blu ray player?

It scores the phrase match a 29 vs. broad match of 38. In effect, Google is saying that broad match volume is 224% more than the phrase match volume. But the Keyword Tool tells us that broad match volume is only 131% more than phrase match volume. This is a big difference.

It gets even worse when we get into head to head comparisons using a broad match long-tail keyword. Let’s take a look at the keywords blu ray player and cheap blu ray player in Keyword Tool:

We see 8100 searches for cheap blu ray player and 4,090,000 for blu ray player. According to the Keyword Tool, blu ray player is searched for 500 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

For the same keywords Google Insights shows:

A score of 1 for cheap blu ray player and 38 for blu ray player means that according to Google Insights, blu ray player is searched for only 38 times more often than cheap blu ray player.

The tools disagree with each other by an astonishing factor of 1300%.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Mediocre

We can’t heap too much blame on Google. They themselves say that the tools use different methods to analyze their data. They’ve also made no secret that their tools are not particularly accurate when studying low volume keywords.

But if we can’t trust in Google’s own tools using their own data when it comes to keyword analysis, who can we trust? It’s unlikely that 3rd party tools will yield better results given their reliance on sampling and secondary data sources.

Given all its flaws, Google’s tools are still the best available (certainly the best free tools available) so we hold our nose and take the results with a gallon of salt. Ultimately using Keyword Tool or Google Insights will give us a general idea of where opportunity may lie, but only real world testing will tell us for sure.