Are keyword tools actually accurate?

[billybob99]

I've been watching and reading different things when it comes to SEO, more specifically a few guys on YouTube that say they make a ton of cash, passively from their niche websites.

That's fair enough.

In one video which caught my attention they said, keyword tools such as Moz Keyword explorer, Google Keyword Planner were all BS because they are for advertisers and show buying intent.

Without boring you, they started to show examples of the top 5 keyword tools all saying a certain search phrase has less than 10 searches a month, then the stats from their web analytics (Clicky) showing 4K page views a month for that particular page, all coming from organic search.

They said the only way to determine if you will rank for a keyword is to manually search yourself, see what content comes up - if its old content, short content etc - you can outrank it with in-depth, superior content.

They didn't mention anything about backlinking though, just said they write stuff and let Google do its thing.

Just wanted to get peoples opinions.

 

[UKSBD]

Common sense and your own stats outweighs most keyword tools

If a keyword tool said Yellow Duck was a great keyword you would suddenly get lots of people optimising for Yellow Duck, and lots of people searching for Yellow Duck which would make Yellow Duck look even better as a search word.

There are a lot of sheep out there.

 

[fisicx]

They didn't mention anything about backlinking though, just said they write stuff and let Google do its thing.

Good advice

 

[Awinner2]

Interesting that this site has 183,474 backlinks! And a global Alexa ranking of 60,305 which is excellent. (Just testing out a new tool, not being suddenly clever!)

 

[UKSBD]

Alexa ranking of 60,305 which is excellent.

Pretty sure it was closer to 6,000 when it used to be busy

 

[billybob99]

Good advice

I checked out some of their niche sites, one of them had literally 1 backlink according to Moz.

Yet when you Googled some of the keywords they were going after, they were top and in most cases had the featured Google snippet.

So I'm guessing it is good advice after all.

 

[StevePoster]

Tools are still tools they are still not accurate as you expected because searches in the field is always changing based on the users query everyday. So the keyword that is most used yesterday will not be tomorrow.

 

[OliviaCaitlin]

No Keyword tool is accurate. They just show the estimate how many persons are searching. As you said there is a possiblity that in order to make a keyword more competitive companies may play foul to build more traffic.

 

[estwig]

If I took notice of keyword tools, I'd have a lot of tyre-kickers knocking on my door, pestering me!

Keyword tools are only one part of the picture. How close people are to purchasing and how your process works to get them to purchase from you, makes a big difference to what keywords you choose.

 

[Paul Carmen]

@billybob99 if you are talking about the niche sites of the YouTube guys, some of them have huge followings on YouTube, with the backlinks and ranking signals that in itself delivers.

Plus, knowing some of them, the key to their ranking is backlinks, just not those that you'll see in any backlink SEO tool! As they are from PBNs and deliberately hidden from the bots that crawl the sites for Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush etc.

 

[billybob99]

@billybob99 if you are talking about the niche sites of the YouTube guys, some of them have huge followings on YouTube, with the backlinks and ranking signals that in itself delivers.

Plus, knowing some of them, the key to their ranking is backlinks, just not those that you'll see in any backlink SEO tool! As they are from PBNs and deliberately hidden from the bots that crawl the sites for Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush etc.

The guys I'm following have only really just started their main YouTube channel but they do have channels for most of their affiliate sites with 5K subs on a few channels so I'm sure that plays a part.

But its funny you mentioned PBN's as I was looking into this last night and it showed a guy clone his main site, and inject a few lines into the header - something to do with index no follow and a canonical tag then send a ton of backlinks to that site/page.

Its still new to me, but from what I understood, Google thinks the cloned page is the same as the real live page, and the backlinks that are built to the clone gets juiced to the main page.

I do agree though, a lot of these guys must be hiding links!

 

[WithinSocial]

Keyword tools are a product of human intelligence, rather group of people. It can only be as right as common sense. Depending on how much you know stick to your common sense where possible Google ad word actually gives you recommendations based on what keywords you use and what keywords people are actually keying in to get to competition website. There's Google trend too. Give me a shout for free advice.

 

[AlexiaMax]

Most of the keywords suggestions by keywords tools are just a recommendations. Usually we need to check whether those keywords matches rightly with the service providing. You need to choose the right one manually which bring you conversions to website. There are terms like long term keywords and secondary keywords which play big role in bringing in inquiries to website. It always better to make utilize the help of an experience seo person in deciding the right keyword for website without sticking on to the numbers provided by keyword tools

 

[erasoftseoweb]

The only keyword tool that is useful is Google's Keyword Planner

 

[fisicx]

In many cases, they are accurate.

No they aren't (they are guestimates only).

The only keyword tool that is useful is Google's Keyword Planner

No it's not (it's an adwords tool).

 

[erasoftseoweb]

From my experience with it it's pretty accurate , I only use it to choose my keywords based on competition and average searches , after that I build my websites seo based on that, after some time if I check in webmasters the information in search analytics matches the one give in the keyword planner.

 

[SEO Ninja]

Google's Keyword Planner is used for adwords and gives totally different results, also based on products or services. If used for "train timetable" the results would be very inaccurate. The best software is your own brain, what terms would you uses to search for something? I bought a lawnmower a few week ago, my Google searches: cheap lawnmower, discount lawnmower, cheap electric lawnmower, lawnmower review. After spending an hour doing that I bought it from Amazon!

 

[Andrew Kozman]

One of the most accurate SEO tools HANDS DOWN is Ahrefs. This is because they have the second largest database of keyword and backlinks - second only to Google itself. Now, it's important to note that no SEO tool is 100% accurate... only Google is 100% accurate and they don't share data .

However, comparing the Ahrefs results to the results I get from Google Analytics and Google Console for some of the sites I run and the accuracy is scarily close.

Hope that helps!

 

[xoxoseo]

No Keyword tool is accurate.

No SEO tool is accurate.

 

[bmt Promotions]

Most of the keywords suggestions by keywords tools are just a recommendations.