Why You Need To Turn To Third Party Tools For Keyword Research: Which Tool Is Best?

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July 15th, 2022

Who’s better qualified to tell you what people search for on Google than Google itself?

Relying on Google-native tools to report keyword research stats seems logical, as we can expect it to show accurate keyword search volume – that is, how many searches come up for a query per month.

However, you might want to reconsider using your usual Google Search Console, or its alternatives, for optimization. Instead, turn to third-party tools for the most accurate, complete, and guaranteed information for all things keyword-related.

This begs the question, why opt out of using Google-native tools and what are their substitutes that are actually useful for gathering keyword intel?

The pros and cons of Google keyword tools

Before examining the merits of third-party alternates, let’s assess Google-native tools we are well familiar with and establish their strengths and weaknesses.

One of the Google-native tools in question is Google Keyword Planner. It’s a free tool, it has keyword search volume data, and it’s Google-native— it seems more than perfect. But as they say, no one’s perfect.

First of all, it is a tool for managing your paid campaigns, which means it’s not best suited for SEO purposes. It has to follow Google advertorial policies, creating gaps in essential specific keyword data.

Also, GKP often provides ambiguous data. For instance, it doesn’t always pull up search volume numbers for a specific query input – it compiles all results that show up for similar queries, which means it includes stats for queries that bear a similar meaning or plurals. As a side note, it gives you ranges, which makes it confusing and unreliable.

“Well, what about other Google tools?” you might ask.

Indeed, another candidate for keyword search intel is Google Search Console.

If you want to get data for concrete insights into search volume stats for a paid campaign, GSC can certainly help. However, it will only display stats for keywords you are already ranking for, not exactly useful for competitive analysis.

In addition, these stats wouldn’t actually display numbers for search volume or keywords: you’re only given impressions of how many times your page ranking for a particular keyword was seen.

So if you wanted to run an effective analysis to reveal keyword gaps between you and your competitors, Google-native tools wouldn’t be the key – unless you would be willing to launch a PPC campaign for every keyword you wanted to analyze.

We’ve summed up the benefits and downsides of Google tools.

However, the merits of one tool don’t compensate for the disadvantages of the other – unclear data and limitations are prevalent in both. So if you want to have a complete quality image of your keyword portfolio, you should opt for third-party tools.

How are Third-Party Tools better?

They cover all the gaps Google-native tools pose that we’ve discussed before. Their analyses often reflect:

Specific search volume statistics – distinguishing between plurals/similarities
Keywords you don’t have to rank for – other sites’ keywords, unveiling any gaps between you and your competitors
Level of competition for any keyword – the difficulty of trending/showing up in the top search results

Apart from balancing out the shortcomings of Google-native tools, there are several factors that determine the value of a good third-party tool:

Keyword database size
Keyword data coverage
Search volume stats accuracy

Keyword database size

The first feature refers to the number of keywords in the database: the bigger the sample size for your research, the more accurate the results.

Tools with small databases would offer a slim list of popular keywords that can easily be found across all tools. A good tool with a large enough database would be useful for all types of industries, especially niche ones that assume specific rare terms.

Keyword data coverage

While a tool may have a large database, among the billions of words it fosters irrelevant or repeated keywords may exist – this is what is implied by keyword data coverage. So if you want to make sure your tool data is high-quality and of the biggest coverage, you have to understand how many keywords don’t have any data to show.

Search volume stats accuracy

As for accuracy, referring to one of the merits of Google-native tools, only Google can reveal entirely exact keyword search volumes, whereas third-party tools can only provide estimates. So it seems that your SEO strategy will be built on incorrect data, leading to wrong conclusions, and wasted resources. One can argue that data accuracy is the most telling aspect of the quality of a keyword research tool. We’ll get to other decisive features later.

Therefore, a third-party tool you choose for research has to not only make up for Google-native limited features but has to have the biggest proximity to the real search volume numbers to be able to yield accurate results.

Now that we’ve established that, what tools should you use? Which has the biggest accuracy? If you look up “keyword research tool,” a billion results show up. So…which one to choose?

Third-Party tools worth your attention

Digging through the billion results for keyword research tools, you’ll find that there are five to six tools that outrank their competitors in all features.

Fortunately, someone’s done the research for you, these tools are Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Serpstat, Sistrix, and Mangools.

A recent study assessed these according to the three decisive factors of what makes a good third-party tool we discussed above – keyword database size, keyword data coverage, and search volume stats accuracy.

Comparative analysis of tools: which one’s the best?

Accuracy test

The study defines the accuracy of non-Google tool data based on how close its search volume statistics are to the real numbers that Google itself reports.

To visualize the accuracy of each tool, they compare their data against impressions data from Google Search Console, where they only took cases (this methodology postexplains these instances) where GSC impression stats could be equal to search volumes.

Comparing the percentage of keywords that come close in value to the real Google stats, they saw the following picture:

% of keywords that match GSC numbers per tool

We can see that out of the six third-party tools, Semrush is a clear winner as it has the highest percentage of keywords that match GSC impression stats, the real numbers Google itself reports.

Notice that the runner-up GKP shown in the graph is reporting data from the free version of the tool, which was used as an alternative to the third-party tools for comparative purposes. Interestingly enough, our winner surpasses Google’s free GKP, which in turn, outranks the other third-party tools.

This means that in terms of data accuracy, perhaps the most important feature of a good keyword research tool, Semrush is your go-to tool.

Data Coverage test

The quality of a tool heavily depends on data coverage. While the tool might pride itself in having a large database, the data for a wide range of keywords may be missing despite what the general stats show.

The graph below displays the amount of “no data” keywords in each tool found in the same study. The lower the amount, the higher the coverage, and hence, the better the tool.

% of keywords with no data per tool

Once again, Semrush wins by a considerable advantage. GKP’s free version and Ahrefs come in close to each other, but with over double the amount of “no data” keywords.

Database Size Test

This is not much of a test. Database size is not the most significant indicator of quality. However, as we can see in the figure below–

Keyword database size for third-party tool Semrush

Image source: Semrush stats page

Semrush once again defeats its counterparts in the test by the largest keyword database on the market.

And the winner is…

Semrush. While each third-party tool can bring valuable assets that outweigh the benefits of and counterbalance the limitations of Google-native tools, the best one has been proven to be Semrush.

You can try Semrush for free with this extended 14-day trial.

Google-native tools fall short in competition with Semrush in all categories, rendering them as not-so optimal choices for keyword research.

Meanwhile, Semrush offers the largest database, while still maintaining the biggest data coverage, and offers the most accurate numbers. This makes it the most reliable solution for keyword research and optimization.

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Samantha Walls

I'm Sam Walls, COO of Starter Story - a platform and community for entrepreneurs and future founders to learn what it takes to build a great business. I joined the Starter Story team approximately 3 years ago, with the goal of providing our readers with the best, most valuable, and inspirational content on the internet.

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