I've been lucky enough to be traveling out of the country since late June (if you get the chance to go to Morocco -- DO IT!) and was pleasantly  surprised to see that Google has added approximate search numbers to their Keyword Tool.  However, I started to wonder just how close the approximate numbers were to the accurate numbers.  So, I decided to look at the numbers from one of my pet projects, eHalfOff.com.

eHalfOff is a site that I work on in my spare time, sometimes going weeks without working on it.  But, for the last year, I've held the #1 ranking for the search phrase "discount websites". I decided a good test would be to compare the released AOL search from a few years ago to test the numbers to the quoted search numbers versus who visited my website.

So, with the Keyword Tool at my fingertips and my analytics information easily accessible, I compared the two numbers. As a reminder, only 54.5% of all searches result in a click.  Of those clicks, the #1 ranking receives 42% of them.  This means that the #1 spot should receive visitors from approximately 23% of the searches.  So, what did my data tell me?

The Keyword Tool tells me that there were approximately 720 searches for the exact phrase "discount websites".   Analytics tells me that I had 185 visitors to my site who searched for the same phrase.  That means 25.7% of all searches resulted in a visitor to my site -- about 12% higher than the search data told me I should get.

Given that traditional AOL users and traditional Google users are different and that Google has tweaked its algorithm in the time since the data was released, I was encouraged.  My simple test tells me that we can trust the numbers Google is giving us.