Why Keyword Tool Data Differs

I was asked by a student of mine today, why the keyword data from tool to tool differs. Plain and simply it boils down to the data source. The Google keyword tool relies of course on Google searches and it is still unclear of the exact quantifying of their numbers and the percent related to true accuracy of the numbers. Some would suggest that Google is still not painting the whole data picture, but it should be in the ballpark. Other tools such as Wordtracker rely on meta search engine queries from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Together these engines account for roughly 3.5 million searches a day. Wordtracker can provide a generic volume estimator across several search engines. Keyword Discovery has 4 databases to choose from with one being an eBay database that includes numbers of times a certain keyword was searched for on eBay.

What does all this mean? All tools should be used in association of one another when deciding on keyword volume. Google will always get the most love, but the others I listed should not be discounted and can be effectively used especially on longer keyword phrase digging. When using any keyword tool, make sure to find out what the source of the data comes from and also the age of the data used.

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