I’ll admit, the Google AdWords Keyword tool has always been my personal favourite tool for researching keywords - but then I work mostly in AdWords PPC, so you can imagine why.

However, one thing that has always frustrated me (and you too most likely) is the lack of numerical data for keyword volume. While Keyword Discovery dutifully spat out solid numbers, Google’s tool only provided coy little bar graphs.

Without a concrete number, I always had to cut and paste my keyword research into excel and change the number associated with the bar graph into a percentage - 10% being a low volume keyword and 60% being high. Of course, while this method sort of worked, I was always left wondering what a 100% keyword would look like (I’m guessing the adult industry would have a few) and what number this would represent in physical NUMERICAL terms.

The PPC team was therefore overjoyed (yes, these things excite us) recently to see that Google are now supplying numerical values to indicate keyword volume. The little bar graphs are still there, but now we also have some proper numbers to work with!

Always a skeptic, I’ve been wondering how accurate the data really is. I’m sure Google KNOW the exact numbers - but are they really going to let us know? *Suspicious face*

I came across this PPC Discussions blog post asking the same question, and according to them, the volume seems to be accurate. I had a look around my campaigns and found some inaccuracies for June volume - but I don’t run many worldwide-targeted-full-budget-broad-matched-search-and-content-network-enabled keywords, so maybe my data isn’t the best to go by?

Those in the SEO industry are warning against trusting the data - this Smackdown blog post has pointed out that AdWords data is aimed at PPC traffic and why it should not be used for SEO keyword research.

At least I can finally see what a 100% volume keyword is! A quick search shows that “Free” comes in at 100% with approximately 618,000,000 searches last month, and (yes, you guessed it) “porn” while substantially less with 185,000,000 searches last month is ALSO a 100% volume keyword.