Keyword Tools Results Discrepancies
I always get this question from visitors of my blog and participants of my training program, “How to know for sure if a particular topic or Niche market is profitable? Why most results from keyword database tools are different? and “ Why the discrepancies?”
So, to answer the first question, we need to understand the difference between ‘Market Research’ and ‘Keyword Research’. There is a significant difference. Market research is conducted first, only then keyword research but many marketers do the exact opposite. (I’ll talk about ways to conduct Market research in a different post!)
In fact, before I even start any Niche project, or register a domain name, I’ll first check if that particular target Niche market has any potential for profits. Afterall, I am a marketer foremost!
You see, there are many-many Niche markets out there but NOT all Niche markets are profitable. So, the way to do it correctly is, pre-determine profitability from the start, using these set criteria:-
- Whether if there is strong demand?
- If sales are strong?
- Is there commerce being moved?
- How stable is the market ?
- Is it a seasonal trend or are sales generally up throughout the year?
- Is there a lot of competition? (competition is good!)
Don’t get misled thinking that the lesser the competition, the better. It’s actually the other way around. The more the competition, the better because if a Niche market has less or no competition at all, it could mean that the ‘buying power’ is weak and there are fewer actual purchasers.
TIP: Some of the market-places I’m currently in right now are highly competitive but 90% of my blog-sites are earning me a decent income.
Let ‘s dive in deeper with another example:-
Say, you’re interested to work in the ‘Cameras’ niche and after doing a preliminary check you discovered the keyword phrase “digital cameras” has been searched for 5,680 times in the last 24 hrs.
But, if you conducted your search using various other keyword tools, you’ll notice the results from each are different.
In fact, when I conducted a check with 4 different keyword tools, all 4 showed me different results for the same keyword phrase “digital cameras”. So, which tool is telling the truth? All are!
Each keyword database is accurately showing how many times a keyword phrase appears in that given dataset. But it has no clue as to the number of searches in the whole world especially when 98% of the data is held by the Big Five search engines. (See Comscore’s latest 2010 report)
So, meaning, if one tool says there are 5,680 searches a day, that doesn’t mean that during the whole day, the entire World Wide Web only had 5,680 searches.
What this means is, the keyword phrase was searched for 5,680 times from a chunk of data owned by that particular keyword tool company or search engine.
This result is NOT a collective result, meaning, they’re not from every single search engine or keyword tool company on the Internet! There is NO tool which does this.
The current keyword databases available to the public maybe account for ONLY 2% of the Internets keyword data collected in total. That’s why, many services show you 2 sets of results;
1. Regular count no.
2. Predicted daily count
The predicted daily count is only telling you a prediction! It tells you, how many searches may have occured across all search engines for a given keyword phrase. Maybe! It’s only a probability. An assumption!
That’s why when it comes to search count reliability, I prefer to rely on results shown by Google’s keyword tool since Google accounts for 65.7% of total searches done on the Internet. (see Comscore.com report above)
