How accurate is google keyword planner?

Callum Short

Callum Short

Founder @ Beambox.com
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If I'm honest, it's putting me off quite a bit.

I used google keyword planner to show monthly average searches for the last 12 months on keywords such as "*location* cleaner" "*location* maids" "*location* commercial cleaning" and each individual one was getting no more than 100 searches/month, some under 50 searches.

@localcasestudy is able to operate businesses effectively using locally contextual keywords for niches, they are successful and from what I understand he is reliant on these keywords to gain traffic/conversions using PPC and SEO. Are these numbers more valuable than I think? Am I doing something wrong?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, thanks :smile:
 
These numbers will always be low and always will be underestimated. The only real value in them for me is getting an idea of relative traffic.

Even if we assume they are accurate though, which I don't think they are, you then have to take into account that the average conversion rates for local service is almost 3 times that of regular ecommerce (so these numbers make more sense multiplied by 3 if you look at it in that light) and the monetary value of a conversion is pretty damn nice.

So yeah I wouldn't rely on these numbers, they mean very little as far as expected value. Find a way to rank for them and you'll see.
 
people still use
google keyword planner?
 
localcasestudy said:
These numbers will always be low and always will be underestimated. The only real value in them for me is getting an idea of relative traffic.

Even if we assume they are accurate though, which I don't think they are, you then have to take into account that the average conversion rates for local service is almost 3 times that of regular ecommerce (so these numbers make more sense multiplied by 3 if you look at it in that light) and the monetary value of a conversion is pretty damn nice.

So yeah I wouldn't rely on these numbers, they mean very little as far as expected value. Find a way to rank for them and you'll see.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the insight, I have always been rather dubious of it's accuracy.
 
I'm going to answer your question in a round about way. My personal opinion is that PPC should always precede SEO efforts targeted at specific terms. Run some campaigns, get a sense of impression volume and find the ones that convert. Initially I normally run a bunch of modified broad match and then dig down into specific queries once I have some volume (building a good negative list along the way). With this information you should be able to formulate a good strategy that weighs volume vs. commercial intent vs. competition. Why spend a bunch of time going after queries that may end up sucking either from a conversion or volume standpoint if it can be avoided? That's the way I've always done it anyways, YMMV.
 
I personally use TermExplorer. I don't care much about the exact data. All I need is the overall idea of the niches, main keywords. The more you work on niches, the more precise estimates you can make yourself.
 
Realize as well that, although that very specific term in the area may only receive a certain number of searches per month (likely not reported very accurately), that there are boatloads of similar and related terms that you can rank for or target with PPC that will convert just as well if not better, that all come together to supply you with an absurd amount of volume. The money is in the long-tail, and even the too-long-to-register tails that everyone ignores.
 
+1 for Term Explorer. It's the same data as the planner but the way it's delivered, the scope and scale of it...it's the difference between scraping with scrapebox and manually screen scraping every page of a SERP with your mouse & ctrl+C/ctrl+V.

I've been doing niche research for a long time and it's a game changer in my opinion.
 
As others have said google displays an estimate lower than the actual value, it's just to give an idea of what kind of traffic could be pulled.
 
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