Are we actually getting accurate data on keyword volumes from Moz (or other sources)?

[RickyShockley]

I have a client who does patio furniture repair and restoration. When performing keyword research in Moz for terms like "patio furniture repair" I see that only 11-50 people in the entire US are searching for this term according to the Moz data. However, running an Adwords campaign currently and our top keyword is the phrase match for "patio furniture repair" which has generated over 100 clicks in just a couple of months in ONE county.

Is there a better way to research more accurate results on search volume estimates? This makes organic SEO and keyword targeting hard!

Thanks,

Ricky

[Dalessi]

I feel that the search volume shown in MOZ is generally low compared to other sources. I feel it is more accurate with search terms that have a lot of volume, but in search terms that are under 1000 searches a month, I start to have a lot of problems with the data. Many times there is no search volume data at all for lower volume keywords which get just a few hundred searches per month or less.

Problems with the volume data effect almost everything else in Moz so I hope MOZ sees this and tries very hard to correct these issues.

[tawnycase]

Hey there, Ricky! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.

We use several different sources for our search volume data, including Keyword Planner and anonymized clickstream data. From there, we built a model that predicts the search volume range a keyword is likely to have with ~95% accuracy. For the nitty gritty details explaining how the model works, check out this article: https://moz.com/blog/sweating-details-google-keyword-tool-volume

You can read more about the Keyword Explorer Metrics in our Guide.
I've also got a few resources about keyword research and keyword strategy that might be helpful:

• The Keyword Research guide is a really good place to start if you need a refresher course!
• There's a great post in the Moz Blog about creative free keyword research
• If you're looking for insight into competitor keywords, try heading over to Open Site Explorer, pop in your competitor's URL, and take a look at the anchor text associated with their links. This can be a huge indicator of targeted keywords, which you might now decide to compete for!
• If you're curious how well you (or a competitor) is ranking for a certain keyword, or how well a certain page on your site ranks, hop on over to the Rank Tracker
• Use the Keyword Explorer tool to check how hard or easy it will be to rank for a certain keyword. Words with a higher difficulty score are harder to achieve rankings for, so some users will target lower difficulty words first and later tackle the hard ones. Something different works for everyone, though!
• When you've got your keywords and are ready to optimize your pages for them, check out the On-Page Grader. This will check a particular URL for optimization with a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and offer a grade based on how well it fares, as well as suggestions for improvement.

​I hope that helps! If you've still got questions about the volumes you're seeing, feel free to shoot us a note at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to answer all your questions in more depth.

[TaylorRHawkins]

Kris beat me to it! I was coming here to say basically the same thing.

[WebMarkets]

Something that has tricked me up a few times in the past is the difference between broad and exact search volume. Every time you compare MOZ keyword volume to Google, just know there is a slight +/- in volume. Plus, its never an exact science, rather than an estimation based on historical data from Google...and subsequently, MOZ.

If ever in doubt, I would utilize Google's data over any other source of data.

[RickyShockley]

Hi Martijn,

Yep noticed that with Google the keyword data is much different than Moz, but I've read (I believe here on Moz) that the GOOGLE data is apparently unreliable. Seems a lot more accurate than the Moz data at this point.

Guess I'll go back to using Google Keyword Planner for keyword research

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Ricky,

That's weird. If I put the same keyword in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool it comes up with an Average Monthly Searches of 1000, see: https://monosnap-m.s3.amazonaws.com/Keyword_Planner__Google_AdWords_2017-08-04_09-41-28.png . While it could be that some other keywords have been grouped in that it seems that the data you've seen before is far off.

Martijn.