Google Trends not Consistent with Google Keyword Tool

[blake-76624]

Hi Everyone,

I was doing a little Google Trends research on Real Estate and narrowed it down to my state.  I have found that on Trends it is showing a two or three towns above the one I am living in showing that it gets a lot of search volume.  They will put the top one as a 1 and then the others below it as like .87 or .675 etc.  I am taking that as 87% of the top one or 67.5% of the top city in search volume.

I checked these numbers against the Google Keyword Tool and found that my town still gets more exact visits  (4 times the amount of the one Google Trends ranks #1)  I can't see the actual search volume on Google Trends but was wondering....Which one do you trust?

I have done some testing on it and realized that for the most part, the numbers in the keyword tool RARELY change.  Do they maybe update it once per year?

FYI: As you know I trended real estate so what I did on the Keyword tool is "Town State Real Estate" and looked at both Broad and Exact searches.

I would appreciate any guidance you guys can give on how I should be paying attention to this data.

Thanks!

[JamesNorquay]

Google Keyword data from the keyword tool is only updated on a monthly basis, trends data is updated more quickly.

Another thing is that keyword tool data is an estimate, I have written a post on alternant keyword research ideas on the SEOmoz blgo recently: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/advanced-seo-keyword-research-tips-and-ideas-14216

Hope it helps