Search volume discrepancies between keyword tools

[JannetteP]

I'm feeling like I'm basing all my research time on tools that I cannot necessarily trust.

Between Google keyword planner, Keywords everywhere chrome extension, and Moz keyword explorer, I'm getting wildly different results on 2 simple keywords related to colleges with baking & pastry arts degrees.

"baking college", "baking colleges"

So Keyword planner won't give me any search volume for those 2 words, I don't even see them in the results. Instead, it decides I really meant "baker college" which has 33,100 global searches. I tried telling it use only closely related terms, but it keeps giving me "baker college" and refuses to show me the terms I asked for. Stubbornly useless.

Keywords everywhere says both of these keywords bring in 33,100 searches. It does not tell me those searches were for "baker college." Totally misleading.

Moz keyword explorer says baking college as 0-10 volume, baking colleges has 101-200 volume. So at least it's not trying to give me "baker college" numbers. Perhaps I can trust this, but it's not convenient to upload hundreds of various keywords at a time to pull the volume numbers like I do with the other tools.

With Keyword planner making assumptions and grouping unrelated terms together, and Keywords everywhere using those numbers without pointing out the assumptions, I feel like I can't trust anything without taking time to dig into the discrepancies, which is impossible with hundreds of keywords.

Do you know of any good search volume tools that don't force or hide assumptions?

Thanks.

[moz_support]

Hi there,

Thanks for the question! I can certainly speak to Keyword Explorer's numbers and how we arrived there. We use a number of sources for our volume data, including Keyword Planner, but oftentimes you will see large discrepancies because our data goes through a disambiguation process. As you noticed, Google Keyword Planner currently bundles similar keywords into one overall volume metric. Most people want specific data rather than a grouped number, so we strive to separate out the individual keyword volumes. You can read more about that here: https://moz.com/blog/google-keyword-unplanner-clickstream-data-to-the-rescue

The trouble is that often times you will have one keyword that is responsible for upwards of 95% of the traffic. So, when the data is separated out, it makes the less-trafficked keywords look suspiciously low when in fact their traffic volume is more accurate in our tool.

We have a few additional articles that discuss our volume data compared to Keyword Planner:
https://moz.com/blog/google-keyword-planner-dirty-secrets

https://moz.com/blog/moz-keyword-explorer-vs-google-keyword

I hope that helps clarify things!