Best keyword traffic analysis tool for long tail search terms?

[DWJames]

Please bare with me, this might turn into a bit of a waffle, but I'll get to my question... I promise!

I've just been looking at our CPC traffic for April and 2 search terms jumped out at me. I recognised them from previous keyword research because they are search terms that I expected to be high traffic (from past experience), but Google Adwords keyword tools showed them to have no potential traffic, and next to no potential traffic (literally 0 local searches and 12 local searches per month).

Last month search term A had 46 visits, with 19:25 average time on site and 8.70% bounce rate and search term B had 10 visits with 14:47 average time on site and 0% bounce rate. For very boring reasons we are not currently able to measure conversions on these terms since (they are related to consumer finance and when a customer applies for finance it is all done on our finance providers website) but despite the low volume, these are pretty good figures for on site behaviour and so it got me thinking...

Is there a more accurate tool to estimate traffic volume that we should be using rather than the Adwords tools?

I appreciate that the estimates are probably made based on historic search behaviour and April's traffic could just be a one off, but these particular terms used to be insanely popular 4-5 years ago when I worked at a competing company.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi James,

Your question makes complete sense :). This is why we often talk about using ppc data to test search volumes. If you're interested in checking the search volume for the term, depending on the type of query matching you're running on the keywords, you can check the impressions of the term in AdWords and get a better picture of the search volume for the query. If you're running exact match on the query, you'll get a much reliable picture of search volume by looking at impressions for the term. The metrics you mentioned give you a picture of the value of the term, and impressions will give you the search volume.

I'd also check out webmaster tools, both Google and Bing, for other search volume numbers. Bing's new tool was built specifically for KW research for organic search.

Hope this helps,

Mark

[BedeFahey]

Completely agree with Mark about the PPC. Someone suggested it to me when I asked a similar question about local search, and I found it worked pretty well.

I've had some luck with SEMrush at smaller traffic volumes - I'm not sure I'd call it really accurate, but it seems to work fairly well as a guide when Google can't do it.

Sometimes the "related searches" option in plain old Google search can unearth some good starting points if you're looking for variations on phrases A and B, since you know they drive the right kind of visitor.

[polarking]

This may not help with PPC as much. I use concentrateme.com it allows you to import directly from Google analytics and gives you a visual layout of keyword analysis.The program also makes recommendations for long tail keywords. Ranks.nl has a very useful tool for suggested keywords (it uses Semrush date)