Jaaxy metrics are not right
I decided to write this blog after helping another member with her website. She couldn't understand why she wasn't ranking for low QSR keywords.
I think I know why.
Jaaxy metrics are wrong when you include certain stop words.
If you search in Jaaxy for "milk a cow" it gives the following results:
Avg 6280 | Traffic 1068 | QSR 380 (big red dot).
You wouldn't try and compete for this would you? Well, I know I wouldn't.
But if you type in the following KW's the QSR is really tempting.
"what is milk a cow"
Avg 6280 | Traffic 1068 | QSR 0 ).
Wow! What a coincidence! The same number of people type in "what is milk a cow" but I think I can rank for this! Wait a minute. It doesn't make sense though.
I'll try "how to milk a cow".
Guess what? The metrics are the same for the traffic count.
So, to confirm.....
If I tried to rank for "how to milk a cow" or "what is milk a cow" I would be facing a QSR of 380 and not 0 or whatever the other search QSR was.
Jaaxy is reporting the QSR correctly, but the traffic is misrepresented when certain stop words are added. I found this out with some of my posts. I hope this can be resolved.
Kyle and Carson: If I am wrong you are welcome to delete this post but I had to highlight this issue to others.
Footnote: Any posts that start with "How to...." or "What is....." are bring misrepresented. You need to think about this for your future posts.
Recent Comments
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I still don't get it, when I search KAT TV I see two listings for What is KAT TV, they are related, one's a video and one's the blog post for it but both with the same What is KAT TV title. So are you saying Google didn't rank this site and video based on What is KAT TV but only KAT TV?
I can't even see your website and by page three the results aren't even relevant anymore to the search term. Is this because I'm not in the UK?
I see your site now that I searched what is KAT TV, 4th listing and the two listings I mentioned above is no. 1 & 2.
So what does this mean? You can still rank for what is KAT TV but the search volume is wrong for that term? Can we find out the real search volume for what is KAT TV?
Exactly Grace! I am ranking for the long keyword but the metrics are wrong and based on no stop words. I.e. kat tv
This makes me so sad and defeated because I had brought this up to Kyle MONTHS ago asking him why I wasn't getting the traffic for a term like that when it had 10k search and super low QSR and he told me I just needed a better title, not just having the keyword. He never anything about stop words, misleading traffic, and all the stuffed I learned last night at 1am which made me not sleep all night since I feel my whole site is a waste of time!!!
Why are we even taught to use long tail keywords then? I don't understand why this is not in the training??
I feel for you, I was the same. Luckily it was only a few of the posts. The training inside Jaaxy should really cover this I feel. Kyle replied below. Long tail kw's are fine as long as they aren't made up of just stop words.
Thanks for this Craig! My last 4 posted consisted of using "what is" before the main KW and I had a bunch more I was planning on using. I was able to get to the second page on them, but if you're not getting the traffic, I will have to rethink that strategy.
Question...I use "what is" in my url, but not in my title, do you think using that strategy will affect the traffic I hope to get?
Thanks
Ralph
Thanks Jovo, the problem is, even when we use stop words that DO make sense like "how to milk a cow" - the traffic still reports 6280 Avg, when in fact that is for "milk a cow" not "how to milk a cow".
I know, I blogged about it earlier. The key-phrases with 'what is', 'how to' etc., are not true key-phrases, only the core part of them are, and this is why it may be hard to rank with them even if qsr is small. They are misleading. The keyword tool gives you only what Google gives to it, the tool is just an interface, sometimes with a few features which are added to sell the tool..
Yes. It's amazing how many people don't know about this. I didn't until I discovered it by doing some digging.
I had not checked it that way. Good that you find it out if nothing else at least now we are aware of it
Ys, the same is true with the standard WA keyword tool. Last year, I managed to rank for keywords like "What is Product Name", but got hardly any traffic despite being on page 1 of Google.
It just seems to be a funny way with how Google deals with keywords. Since the keyword tools get their data from Google, I think the issue is with Google rather than the tools, right?
Sorry, the font issue was because I had temporarily zoomed into 110%. You'll see what I mean if you do that too. It makes the font look a bit different and I thought WA's font had been changed. Turns out I had just forgotten to set it back to 100%.
Hey there Craig,
Thanks for such an interesting post, it wasn't something I was aware of and only used Jaaxy for a few days.
Have you noticed anything like this with the Wealthy Affiliate Keyword Tool, would love to hear from you regarding that as I use the WA KW tool all of the time!
Cheers,
Jacqueline
This also happens with the WA keyword tool, that's the one I've been using the most. I believe it should been taken into consideration.
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Often times keywords are "consolidated" within certain search terms, this is just based on the search engine data that is pulled and we pull from all 3 search engines, unlike most search tools.
One thing that you should know though is that your final search is ALWAYS done on the keyword that makes sense. That is KW research 101 so a term like "what is milk a cow" should never be data you even bother with because you only target keywords that will make sense.
Google instant and Bing Instant influence search results as you will notice as you search in these search engines they give search recommendations that don't make grammatical sense, but they would never rank a site that doesn't have proper grammar so you always want to complete the sentence.
In this case, the final search should be performed on:
what is milking a cow
But again, the application of that doesn't really make a lot of sense. How would you apply a term like that to your business?
How to Milk a Cow
Would make much more sense.
In addition, keyword tools are just "estimates". Google, Bing and Yahoo can give funny data sometimes when we pull data and we do a lot of work to normalize all data, but no keyword tool is going to provide perfect data numbers.
The reason we don't use just Google because over the years we have been unimpressed by the data that they offer, it is often times inflated or deflated drastically.
Hi Kyle,
Thanks for explaining that. I felt it was important to highlight this to other members who didn't know about it.
It happened to me on a couple of posts, the first one being "What is KAT TV". It had little QSR but big traffic and I couldn't understand why I wasn't getting any traffic even though I was on Page 1 for that KW.
After some research, I then realized that the traffic numbers were for "KAT TV" and not the long tail KW.
Anyway, it's kind of irrelevant for me now since I now rank on Page 1 for "KAT TV" too but at the time it was confusing for me.
Cheers,
Craig.