If you’ve done keyword research in the past, which I’d assume you have since you’re reading this blog, then you have probably used Google’s keyword external tool. It’s free and gives you a pretty good idea for search volume. I’ve never relied on the competition graph that they show, though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve manually checked for competition and found it to be way off from what it shows.

Google now has an enhanced search tool for all your keyword research. It is supposed to take your website’s keywords and compare them to the volume of searches that are actually done. Ideally, it gives you ideas for keywords you’re not already using.

The Google Sktool was featured by BestRank.com as a must have research tool. So, today I was playing around with it, and I have to say I have big doubts about how accurate this new tool is. I’m seeing some very large variations between the traditional keyword tool and the new, search one. Take this for an example… I picked out a travel blog that had a post about Seychelles in it. Google’s Sktool gave me the following results:

Well, that’s not too shabby. It suggests “north island Seychelles”, which has over 1,000 searches on average every month and I didn’t come up with a crazy number of possible competitors. However, now I head to the good old, basic keyword tool. Here’s what it says for the exact searches on average per month:

What the heck? I don’t know about you, but dropping from over 1k searches to just over 200… that makes a difference to me. So I guess the question is which of Google’s keyword tools are more accurate? Sure, there were other comparisons I did that were, at least within the same ball-park. But there were many that were nowhere close. Have you used the new tool? Have you compared them?

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Tags: Google, Keyword Research, Keywords

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Keywords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.