And the debate rages on. What keyword tool is best to use? Is it Google’s? Is it Wordtracker’s? Or maybe it’s somebody else’s. Well, the answer that this article is going to give you may or may not surprise you. See, if you’re looking for a keyword tool that is the most accurate, you can forget it…none of them are. You can choose to believe that or not…your decision. However, you might want to read this article on how to actually go about picking and using a keyword research tool.

The truth is, none of the keyword tools are 100% accurate. Some are a little better than others, but in the grand scheme of things, if you’re looking for hard numbers, forget it. You’ll have better luck finding gold in your backyard. The key to finding and using a keyword tool is consistency. In other words, pick one, use it, understand the results it gives you and THEN you will be able to interpret them accurately when you actually do your research.

So how does this work? Well, pick a tool…any tool. It doesn’t matter. What we are going to do with the tool is compare its results to your results. In other words, compare how many searches the tool comes up with as compared to how many daily visitors you get. In order to do this, we need a few things. First thing is the tool itself and a keyword to look up. Let’s say we look up “building a motor boat.” I just grabbed that out of thin air. Now, Google says it gets about 46 searches a month. That’s not much, but there are only 167 competing sites for this phrase.

What we have to do next is compute the KEI, which is (monthly searches)/(competing sites) X monthly searches. We come up with a KEI of 12.67, which is pretty bad, but still there is almost no competition and should be easy to rank number 1 page 1 if we put in the effort. Now, here is where you can tell how close the keyword tool is. If we’re number 1 and we’re getting 46 searches a month, arguably, we should get at least 23 of those people to our site each month. But if we only get 2 people, then something is off. The number of searches is inflated.

If we do this for enough keywords, we will eventually see a pattern…a percent of actual visits to projected visits for each keyword. And yes, if the keyword tool is consistently off, you WILL see that pattern. So let’s say you discover that you’re only getting 10% of the total number of searches each month, even though you are in a number 1 position. You can then safely say that for a keyword that shows 10,000 searches a month, you’ll probably only get about 1,000 monthly searches for that phrase from this keyword tool, provided that you do achieve number 1 in the search engines.

No, it’s not an exact science, but it’s very close. Bottom line is this, you’ll get a feel for how accurate the tool is and once you’ve done enough of these keywords (about 100 will do the trick) you’ll be able to use the tool with confidence knowing that you can predict the amount of traffic that you’re going to get.

Point is, no keyword tool is perfect, so stop looking for it.

Use what you have, learn to interpret the results, and eventually that tool will become the most accurate weapon at your disposal.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Pick up your FREE report at http://www.nicheresearchrevolution.com/report.html on how to research profitable niches so you’re not spinning your wheels trying to find that diamond in the rough. They’re out there…You just have to know how to find them.