Understanding Keywords & Tools

One of the most important tasks in the SEO world is to understand keywords that best match a client’s target market. The most popular tool used to carry out keyword analysis is Google Keywords Tool.

Now, the complexity builds with so many different figures and numbers for a given keyword from the many sources. Although Google is continuously improving its efforts to provide as much accurate data as possible, it is hard to arrive at a conclusion as to which tool provides the best keyword analysis.

Jumping right into the pros and cons of the many tools, the new keywords tool integrated with Insights for Search beta is a massive improvement specially as it gives trend information which enables predicting the advertiser competition for the keywords in the near future and the change in search volumes. The Insights for Search tool provides information on the number of searches for a given keyword on a daily basis, providing a better understanding and opportunity to measure keywords value closer.

A blog post on SEOMoz concludes that the old and new keywords tools ‘seem to be very close to one another’.

Google Webmasters Tool also provides information on keywords performance for the website with statistics for keywords that influence the website most. A common observation when comparing the impressions and Click through Rates (CTRs) even for the branded terms is that the data is not comforting. For example, if you are looking for ‘Uniqlo’, a natural expectation is that the number of impressions has to equal the number of clicks. However, this is not the case as the CTR could be as low as 11% even for the branded term. The take away with impressions data is the potential for the non-branded keywords that can influence traffic to the website.

A drawback with all the tools put together is that the differences in CTR from webmasters tool, number of visits from Analytics and the number of estimated search volume according to Keywords tool simply do not correlate or provide any conclusive complete understanding of the keyword performance.

Although, a firm conclusion cannot be drawn on the which tool provides the best understanding of keywords for a complete keyword analysis, a good way is to juggle with the keywords tools and monitor keywords performance at regular time intervals from a wide range of tools and applications and more importantly update the target keywords for a given website with trends affecting the business for which the website is meant.

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