How to Tell if Your Keyword Research is Bogus

Sep 12, 2008 at 8:02 pm in KARMA by ian

I had a nice email exchange with Lisa – who asked amongst other things – why I’ve made several reference to NOT trusting keyword research results, which keyword tool she SHOULD use and WHY I’ve repeated numerous times that these results are NOT trustworthy!

I’m going to make this quick – and I’m going to illustrate it fast, and I’m going to reiterate that I DO use premium (paid) Keyword Tools everyday to make niche market determinations, and they do serve a really nice purpose. I would also like to point out that I DO believe, in the abscence of paying for these tools ( as in, if you can’t afford them or aren’t ready to spend the cash) you can still do equally as well as those of us who do, simply by activating your most powerful keyword digger – your imagination. ( in combination with a good thesaurus and a brainstorming session or two)

The screenshots below, for simplicity sake, were pulled from two separate tools – the Google Keyword tool that is free, and can be accessed here, and the Nichebot service ( which is fee based) and is collecting these numbers from the Wordtracker API – or however they grab the data from WT.

Note – I do believe that Nichebot only culls the numbers from Yahoo now if you don’t have a SOAP key, which obviously skews the metric downward ( as yahoo doesn’t get nearly the quantity of queries) and while I know there are all kinds of smart folks out there who will give you a whole bunch of ways to arrive at a "real" number to guestimate more accurate data, I’ve found the spreads so incredibly wild in so many occasions that it actually is LESS heavy lifting for me to simply take the broad, general keyword, lateralize it using my own natural linquistic skills, double back and run a thesaurus query on everything I’VE come up with and dump it all into a spreadsheet for segementation.

I’ll then add my "copy" triggers – i.e., you longtail the phrases using common language that you know is part of your audience buying cycle, and is part and parcel of the conversational hypnosis that triggers people to click on your articles, titles, or organic search listings. ( ie. – how to do x, proven ways to do y, 3 shortcuts to do Z, etc)

Anyway – for illustration only, look at trying to glean any actionable intelligence from the two screenshots below, both taken in the last half hour, and both queries done on the phrase match "article marketing". Not only are the Google numbers SO wildly different, the Nichebot results ( pulled from WT) are junk.

And SUCH junk, that if I wasn’t using a secondary source ( in this case – big daddy Google’s OWN tool) I never would have continued on with this niche.

Why it Matters? If you spend HOURS on Keyword Research to pick a niche….you better HOPE your numbers are CLOSE to Right!

Of course, in this particular scenario, I knew going in that Nichebot’s numbers were wrong – as I do PPC advertising for "article marketing" and do organic content creation to boot. ( so I KNOW the traffic stream is much greater than the paid tool is reporting)

Hope all that makes sense – check both images out below, and ask any questions should you have them. In one of my next posts, I’ll cover a way I do killer keyword research in real time that I’ve truly never heard anyone mention before – it’s my secret weapon for real time intelligence gathering that cuts through a lot of the shit, and let’s me know whether or not the keywords I’m targetting are in fact getting real traffic. Or not. ( and it’s totally and completely free as well!)