I saw a post yesterday on John Battelle’s site entitled “Fred says: Google is lame” I laughed.
Then today I started playing with their keyword tool. What a piece of junk!
Not one suggestion we tried actually tied into what sites were showing up for in their SERPS. In fact, the keyword suggestions that appeared were tied against variations on one random phrase taken from each page, and all suggestions were variations against those phrases.
For example, for one site dealing in, and showing up well in the SERPS for a stem cell research related query, the suggestion tool came up with “anti stem cell research” and “to stem cell” as the main terms, and proceeded to offer suggestions relating to those terms. Unfortunately, the phrases “anti stem cell” and “to stem cell” do not appear anywhere in their content !
Here’s another example:
Google’s Keyword tool says this page is about; “postcard”, “postcards” and “animated postcard” and all their suggestions relate to that term.
Yet, they get no traffic for that term. Not one hit from Google (or MSN / Yahoo etc…)
They do show up in Google for “picture sharing” and “photo sharing” All data is for just today.
Details for picture sharing (Google)
13 hits Highest SERP Clicked: 1 Lowest Rank SERP Clicked: 2 Average SERP Position: 1.3
Details for photo sharing (Google)
88 hits Highest SERP Clicked: 1 Lowest Rank SERP Clicked: 5 Average SERP Position: 1.3
Surprisingly, Google Romania and Singapore sent through the traffic from the fifth page, whereas no one using Google.com actually looked beyond page 2.
Interestingly, for the term “video sharing” people are going quite deep into the SERPS to find acceptable results.
Details for video sharing (Google)
12 hits Highest SERP Clicked: 5 Lowest Rank SERP Clicked: 22 Average SERP Position: 1.3
People also went to page 22 in MSN, and page 8 in Yahoo. The deeper clickthroughs / ranking results tended to come from countries outside North America. I’m not sure why.
Regardless; Google’s keyword suggestion tool’s output had NO semblance to the content of the webpage, or to what Google, or any other SE is sending traffic to that page / site for.
Oh, all these numbers are drawn from a proprietary technology cited elsewhere in the last few days.
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