I recently put up some slides from my Digiweb Presentation. In the comments Dave Callan asked me to grab some keyword data from Wordze (my sampling tool of choice BTW).

Dave asked me to grab data on 2 search phrases – “Online Marketing Ireland” and “Internet Marketing Ireland”. Wordze is a great tool for general keyword research, but you have to always bear in mind that Ireland is a small market and they getting accurate data from any tool for Irish search queries is always going to be difficult.

But strangely enough there was quite a bit of traffic on both those phrases:

Online Marketing Ireland Search Query Report

Here’s the same report for [Internet Marketing Ireland]:

Internet Marketing Ireland Search Query Report

While I’m sure there has been an insurgent interest in Online/Internet marketing here in Ireland over the past year, I think that that interest has been overshadowed by something else.

But… Who’s Making All Those Searches?

The main problem with any professional keyword tool is that the data will always be based on available data sources, and in general no one source is reliable. In the case of Wordze they do appear to have access to Irish ISP data (they don’t actually tell customers where they’re data comes from BTW), but there is no real way to validate that data.

The main problem with any keyword research for the SEO/SEM category is that a very large number of the reported searches are going to be executed for the purpose of collecting keyword data (was that sentence as difficult to understand as it was to write?). So every time I do a search on Google for either of those terms I have absolutely no interest in acquiring the service – I’m just interested in who’s doing what in my niche.

And let’s face it – every man (web designer or not) and his dog is now an Irish SEO expert.

NB: Just to qualify my subtle use of irony – I reckon I could count the people who really know what they’re doing on 2 hands. Maybe even 1 hand.

And therein lies the ultimate fallacy of keyword research for the SEO/SEM niche. Chances are very high that most of those searches were conducted by people like me. I’m not saying that the data has no value, just that you have to be very careful how you interpret it. Even an Adwords campaign is unlikely to uncover the true number of ‘real’ searches.

If you’re interested in a decent keyword tool I can highly recommend Wordze. Some great features, and some new stuff in the pipeline that might be of additional interest to Search Marketers this side of the pond I believe…