Learning to trust the keyword tool

I've just re-watched the Keyword lesson in bootcamp. I'll admit that I've been a bit skeptical about the results in the keyword tool. I have no way of confirming the accuracy of the number of searches per month and top ranking traffic. But how about the Competion/QSR?

Well tonight I finally put some real time in to searching for niche-related keywords. I found a long tail keyword that has this result with the tool: 56 / 10 / 1 / 8. 1 is the competition. Excellent.

When I Google that term I get 5,380,000 results. However if I quote the keyword I get exactly 1 organic result and 3 ads. So, since the 1 quoted result matches the 1 reported by the tool, then I will assume the 56 searches and 10 traffic are also accurate.

The takeaway

I'm going to test this keyword specifically. Once Google indexes my page, I should be at the top of the search results for that quoted keyword. Then I'll track it in Analytics for a month and see if I get 10 hits. It's a small test, but the number doesn't matter. I just want to see the result.

The other takeaway

Here's something I didn't catch the first time I went through the keyword lesson and watched the video. The value of keywords that seem to be not so valuable based on the search and traffic, are valuable if you use enough of them.

1000 hits is 1000 hits. It doesn't matter if that's 100 hits for 10 keywords, or 1000 on one keyword. Traffic is traffic.

So at the early stages of my site I think I should focus on keywords with really low competition. The average search and traffic only dictate how much effort I need to put in to content. Lower numbers x more effort = more traffic.

What do you think of my plan?