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Many people were pleasantly surprised to find that Google has now added monthly search count to their External Keyword Tool. This now replaces the former relative search volume metric, which displayed “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” green bars. This is certainly long overdue considering Google obviously had this information all along. The question I have is why provide it now and why did they withhold displaying it all this time?

Actually, that question is fairly unimportant. As always, Google does whatever they please whenever they want.

Perhaps a better question is how useful is the search count data for both Adwords PPC and SEO work?

First off, I rely on the Google External Keyword Tool (actually use the version from within my Adwords account) almost exclusively for my PPC work. Since the vast majority of my paid search campaigns are on Adwords, why not use Google’s data?

For my SEO efforts, I use a combination of the Google tool and the WordTracker Free Keyword Tool. For this I use Micro Niche Finder as a front-end to the WordTracker Free tool and Google search. I find the keyword competition data that I can extract from this invaluable for both my SEO strategy and for coming up with article topics for pulling in back links and additional traffic.

You can watch a video I made on how I use Micro Niche Finder for finding article topics.

I’ve never used any of the paid keyword tools and services such as SEO Elite, Nichebot, Keyword Discovery, etc.

At the end of the day, the keyword data comes from only two main sources — Google’s index and the meta crawlers that WordTracker taps into. The rest of the features of these paid tools and services are just extra bells and whistles that make things easier, but I can’t justify paying for. That’s why I made the investment in Micro Niche Finder as it gives me some added convenience and assists with the task of data mining keyword competition.

So how useful is the monthly search count figures in the updated Google Keyword Tool?

Personally, not very useful for me. At least for Adwords PPC. The relative indicators served my purposes just fine for this and I actually kind of miss them now. I haven’t used the new figures yet for SEO work, so I’ll have to wait before deciding how useful it might be in that area. However, since I primarily use the WordTracker free tool for SEO, I’m not sure how I might make use of the Google data.

I have read some complaints on forums that the Google search count data doesn’t jibe with the WordTracker search count and in many cases is way off.

It is important to compare apples and apples first.

Since the keyword data is coming from different indexes, it’s not going to be identical, but should be somewhat close. The first thing is to be aware of what is being displayed in both tools. Google displays the monthly search count whereas WordTracker displays the daily search count. So the first thing you must do is multiply the WordTracker search count by approximately 30 to get the monthly count. Micro Niche Finder does this automatically.

The other thing is be aware that the Google tool has four different match types - “broad“, “phrase“, “exact“, and “negative“. Play around with “broad”, “phrase”, and “exact” when comparing to the WordTracker tool.

The closest results I can get between the two tools is when I set the Google tool for “exact” match, and even then, is off by more than 30%. But again, I’ll go with the Google results over WordTracker since that’s the search engine I’m primarily concerned with anyway and it is their data after all.

So yes, it’s nice to finally see some actual numbers behind the monthly search count, but it really has little or no impact on how I will do my keyword research.