There are a lot of keyword research tools available, so which one should you choose?

I use 2 research keyword tools myself, but for different purposes. My basic keyword research is always done with Wordtracker. I have 100% faith in the data returned from Wordtracker based on the results I have seen from various keywords I have targeted over the years. I cannot say the same for other keyword tools which use Overture’s Suggestion tool for "demand" data.

Let me tell you a true story.

"A couple of years ago, I carried out keyword research for a web page I was creating about pheromones. I was going to send my traffic to a merchants site and get commission on any sale generated. Using the Overture tool, I found 4 or 5 terms with reportedly 47000 + searches in recent weeks…. and that is just at Overture.

I thought, hey, great. There should be several times this many searches originating from Google. I created a couple of pages and optimized them. I got #1 position on MSN, and later, #1 on Google too for some of my chosen terms.

When I saw my rankings, I could see the $$$ signs in front of my eyes. Two days later I had received just 6 visitors to my top ranking pages. My millions were melting away before my eyes.

I checked on WordTracker and found that in the last month, there has only been 41 searches for my main keyword according to Wordtracker (1 or 2 searches a day)".

There are various reasons why Overture’s tool over-estimates values for certain keywords, but we don’t have time to go into that now.

Let’s just take a quick example - you can try it yourself if you want.

Search Overture’s tool for "fly fishing reel". Here are the top 3 results that I get:

fly fishing reel 5179

fly fishing rods and reel 377

saltwater fly fishing reel 126

Overture data is measured over the previous month. To get comparable data at Wordtracker, I found out how many times Wordtracker estimates the phrase is searched for at Google in 24 hours, and multiplied by 30.

Here is what Wordtracker returns for those top 3 Overture phrases (Google searches per month):

fly fishing reels 390

fly fishing rods and reels 60

saltwater fly fishing reels 120

For the phrase "fly fishing reel", Overture says it was searched for 5179 times in January, whereas Wordtracker puts that figure closer to 390.

For the phrase "fly fishing rods and reels", Overture says 377, Wordtracker says 60.

For the phrase "seawater fly fishing reels", Overture says 126, Wordtracker says 120.

Go on, try it yourself

Not convinced? What I suggest you do, is try this experiment with several different phrases.

e.g. My old search on Overture for "pheromone" suggests that the phrase pheromone was searched for 54,905 times last month.

Wordtracker estimates that at Google pheromone was searched for 5940 times in a month.

Which do I rely on? Wordtracker of course.

While the two measurements cannot really be directly compared (as they provide search information based on different engines), I have found that the number reported by Wordtracker do correlate very well with the traffic I receive when I get a #1 in Google.

So where does this leave all the keyword tools that are available?