Are we actually getting accurate data on keyword volumes from Moz (or other sources)?
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
Kris beat me to it! I was coming here to say basically the same thing.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moz can't crawl my new website?
We had a new website go live at the end of April - I keep requesting crawl tests but I get this in the excel copy... URL Title Tag
Moz Bar | | RayflexGroup
http://www.pvc-strip.co.uk 602 : Page redirects to a URL outside the scope of this campaign. I always list the website as https://... but the crawl always returns the http:// version. Not sure what I can do to make sure the website can be crawled?0 -
What is a Good Keyword Priority Score?
Howdy gang, This is my last discussion post in the series on keyword metrics in KW Explorer & Moz Pro (previously on Keyword Difficulty, Opportunity, & Volume). In this one, let's chat about the "Priority Score," a feature you'll find in Keyword Explorer on any lists you build. Priority was conceived to help aggregate all the other metrics - Difficulty, Opportunity, Volume, and (if you choose to use it) Importance. We wanted to create an easy way to sort keywords so the cream would rise to the top -- cream in this case being keywords with low difficulty, high opportunity, strong volume, and high importance (again, if you choose to use it). Thus, when it comes to Priority Score, there's no particular number you should necessarily seek out, but higher is better. When you get into the ranges of 80+ (which is quite rare, Single Malt Scotch is one of the few examples I could find, and only because it's volume is so high and there's only a couple SERP features), you're generally talking about keywords with high demand (lots of monthly searches), the difficulty isn't too crazy (a website in the 55-80 DA range might have a shot), and the CTR Opportunity is decently strong (usually not too many SERP features that take clicks and attention away from the organic web results). Below that score range, you're usually finding keywords where one or more of those isn't true -- there's either lower volume, heavier competition, or lots of SERP features with the accompanying lower estimated CTR. When you're building KW lists, my view is that there's no "good" or "bad" Priority scores, only relative scores. Priority should be used to help you determine which terms and phrases to target first -- it's like a cheat code to unlock the low hanging fruit. If you build large lists of 50-100 or more keywords, Priority is a powerful and easy way to sort. It becomes even more useful if you use the Importance score to help add an estimation of value to you/your business/your client in to the mix. In that case, Importance can cut Priority by up to 2/3rds (if you set it at 1) or raise it by a little more than 3X (if you set it at 10). This is hyper-useful to nudge keywords with middling scores up if they're super-important to your marketing efforts. Look forward to your feedback, and thanks for checking these out!
Moz Bar | | randfish8 -
KW Explorer is Working to Disambiguate Keywords Google Merges Together
Hey gang, Russ Jones from Moz has been doing a ton of heavy lifting work to try to get around the new problem posed by Google AdWords recent change to merged-keyword volume data. But, we're fighting back against this obfuscation in Keyword Explorer. I'm sharing two emails (slightly edited) from Russ about what we're doing here: Introduction to the Problem: Google Adwords Keyword Planner is the primary source for keyword search volume (how often a keyword is searched monthly on Google) for much of the search marketing industry. While Google has grouped together highly-similar terms for a while (especially misspellings), in June of 2016 they dramatically increased this keyword-grouping. This means similar phrases like "keyword rank", "keyword ranking" and "keyword rankings" would all be reported as having the same, combined search volume, rather than their individual search volumes. If you were to take Google's numbers at face value, you might think there are 3,000 searches per month for these 3 terms, when in reality there is only 1,000, divided amongst the 3 terms. How we are addressing it: Moz's Keyword Explorer uses a blend of data sources, not just Keyword Planner, to build our volume metrics. This gives us a distinct advantage in that we can adjust the volume of words that deviate dramatically in one data set verses another. Take for example the phrases "keyword rank", "keyword ranking", and "keyword rankings". While Google Keyword Planner might report all of these as having 1,000 searches per month, Moz Keyword Explorer can detect that these numbers are significantly higher than what our models would predict given our other data sets. We can then adjust the volume accordingly. Moreover, given our huge keyword data set, we can also identify grouped phrases (like these 3) and divide the volume proportionally to what we see in our other data sets. Thus, we address the grouping problem from multiple directions. Here's email #2 from Russ, detailing more of how we're attacking this: I have been working pretty much non-stop on this keyword volume disambiguation problem (finding the real search volume of individual keywords when Google clumps several together). I think I have settled on a pretty good solution and am working on getting it all in. For example... Google Keyword Volume for the phrases "briefcase for women" and "briefcases for women" are both at 3600 because they have been lumped together. My disambiguation script says the singular (briefcase for women) should be 2731 and the plural should be 869. Google Trends roughly agrees with this, showing that the singular is searched more than 2x the plural: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=briefcase%20for%20women%2C%20briefcases%20for%20women&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4 Basically, Keyword Explorer should already be providing some more accurate/segmented numbers than AdWords, and in the future, we'll get even better thanks to our clickstream data and our evolving models. Any questions, let us know!
Moz Bar | | randfish15 -
MozBar is displaying different numbers than Moz Pro
We have over 15 accounts with Moz Pro, and I just noticed that almost every single one has a different DA when comparing the MozBar to their campaign. Any idea why this is? The DA of most of our sites seems to have dropped across the board, in some cases somewhat severely.
Moz Bar | | anchour0 -
Suggestion: Moz Domain Authority should take disavow into account
Since Moz is trying to predict how Google ranks your site, and Google claims to take the disavow file into account, I'd like to suggest that Moz allow webmasters to upload their disavow file. I imagine this data would be useful to Moz in determining Domain Authority (they may even think of other ways to use it and might even help come to a conclusion on the great debate) and it gives a chance for sites to improve their Moz DA when they are bombarded by spammy links. I'd love to hear the community's thoughts on this idea, as well as the what Wizards of Moz have to say.
Moz Bar | | YairSpolter1 -
Moz Crawl Showing Duplicate Content But It's Not?!
Unfortunately I can't give out the URL, but here's the deal... I have two URL's which have completely different content on them but are being crawled as duplicate content. Any Idea how that would happen? I'm not seeing any errors in WMT's. Has anyone seen this before? Is the duplicate content reporting based on a % of the page content matching as the same?
Moz Bar | | Swarm-SEO0 -
Moz crawl sees meta description but there are none
I have a new site I have run a starter crawl on. The crawl came back saying some of the pages do indeed have meta descriptions. When I go to the same page and use the Moz Chrome toolbar it says they do not have meta descriptions. I also know they do not have meta descriptions. Are there any instances in which the Moz crawler would see them when they are not there?
Moz Bar | | SBXMedia0
