Google is so inaccurate

Hi all

Been visiting BHW for quite a while now and one thing I have realised is that if you want good answers or information then this is the place to be.

I am still a novice in the world of IM but steadily learning, I have gotten a few sites ranked well and making a small amount of money but finding good keywords is still tricky, mainly because Google is so inaccurate.

As part of my niche selection process I put the keyword into Google Keyword Tool and if it shows a reasonable searched for volume then I will put same keyword into Google to check how many pages are showing for same, now I know this is very basic to many here but it is only the starting process that I use.

Now the purpose of this post is to ask if there is a best time to use Google for checking search terms, I have been finding that search results are varying daily and sometimes hourly, for example recently I found, during a late evening session, a keyword that had 1600 searched for volume with 68.000 Google page competition, quite interesting I thought so all duly noted down and off to bed I went.

Next morning I begin by double checking only to find that now the competition stands at 597.000, still not too bad a figure but with other test keywords I have noted increases in the millions, so can anyone here tell me when the best time to conduct keyword research is, I use other keyword tools but tend to use Google as the backbone, so to speak and if Google is so inaccurate how can I rely on any other tool. most of which use Google themselves.

So any insight would be most helpful.

What you say is a good thing to know.
Maybe you can check bing or blekko to see a second opinion of the competition.

Hi Ion

I can understand the logic of your suggestion, but with Google being the number 1 player you would expect that their results would be accurate, the difference in results isn't just a matter of a few hundred or even thousands but in some cases it has increased by a million or two.

I have read that search engine results can vary due to results being compiled from different countries than the requesting country (in my case the UK) or that a particular search engine might be overworked and is not able to cope, that is somewhat understandable and so I hoped that someone on BHW might have some insight regarding the best times to get accurate results.

With some of the information to be found on this site it amazes me how knowledgeable some people are, hopefully someone will have an answer.

Hi,

From my experience the results are only updated monthly as the results you are seeing as from the previous month (or maybe several months, I can't remember - either way the results are historical).

I can only imagine that you may have been using different settings during both searches. For example, KW research using broad, phrase and exact match search makes a huge difference to search terms. It may be obvious but are you sure that you didn't search once as exact match then the next time as broad match? I won't get in to the technical difference between search types but broad will bring back thousands or hundreds of thousands+ more results.

As for competing pages, it really doesn't matter. Even if you find a golden keyword in a niche with only 100 competiting pages; if the sites on page 1 of google are high PR, aged domains with authority you still won't rank easily, if at all. Keep that in mind. All that matters are the sites on page 1 when doing a regular, broad match search i.e. typing the keyword without quotes. Regular internet users don't use quotes, so don't do your research in quotes!

If you want to find out if there's traffic on a keyword the only way to do it is to setup a test ad with adwords on the keyword you want to target and see how many impressions you get. No tools are especially accurate when it comes to how much traffic there actually is on that word.

^^ same as this guy, and numbers of competing sites doesn't matter. I'd rather have 1 million crappy sites than 5 awesome ones as my competition. Check the numbers as almost an afterthought. All you really need to check is how well the first page of results is optimized and backlinked.

Hi folks

Thanks for the replies, unfortunately I possibly wasn't as clear in my original post as I had hoped as the input so far has missed the main focal point of the post.

I understand all that has been written in response but my problem is not with the KW tool but with Google search engine itself.

To clarify, for example on Monday night at 10.30 pm I type the phrase joe bloggs into Google, the resulting pages found as matching number at 65000, the next morning at 11.00 am I type exactly the same phrase into Google and this time the results come back as 2.000.000, now that is a big difference and the question is why such a discrepancy, if it does have something to do with the time of search then when is the best time to do searches.

The phrase and times are just examples but do represent my problem closely.