As of June this year, Google is now grouping keyword volumes for similar keywords in Keyword Planner. I wanted to investigate whether or not this is having an impact on the pages that rank for these similar, grouped keywords. My hypothesis is that, given that Google is associating keywords closely enough to group their volumes, we should expect that the search results would be very similar too.
What has Google changed and why does it matter?
The grouping of keyword volumes is a problem for anyone working in search because Keyword Planner is the primary source for volume data that we use in keyword research, whether that be from Keyword Planner directly, or through a third party tool that takes Keyword Planner data as its input—such as SEMRush, BrightEdge or SearchMetrics.
By "grouping keyword volumes," we mean that different keywords that are slightly different (but generally convey the same meaning) are given the same volume, which represents the combined volume of every variation. For example, if (hypothetically) [SEO] is searched 21,000 times per month in the UK, and [Search Engine Optimisation] is searched 12,100 times per month, once these keywords are combined, each will be reported as receiving the total of the two—33,100 searches per month.\
On top of this, in the last few weeks Google have also been reducing access to keyword planner data for some accounts. Earlier this month, it was announced that Keyword Planner data will be given only in very broad buckets for advertisers with "lower monthly spend" (although some ways around this have been found). This is a separate change from the volume grouping, which is the main focus of this article.
The fact that Google is grouping keyword volumes in this way implies that they see these keywords as equivalent, at least to some extent. The questions that this raised for me were:
- Does this mean that we should see keywords with grouped volumes as identical?
- From an SEO point of view, should we focus our targeting efforts on any one of the grouped keywords, given that Google is seeing them as the same?
There is further reason to think this way given the simple fact that Google is always getting smarter. As well as Parsey McParseface, the English language parser that Google released to the public, much of the research output that we see in patents and journal articles from Google relates to natural language processing, so it is clear that this is an area that Google see as a priority for their research.
One way to test whether or not Google does indeed consider grouped keywords to be identical is to look at search results. The theory is that if keywords are viewed identically, we should see exactly the same pages ranking for the keywords.
What's going on in the SERPs?
I did a similar analysis a few months ago, which was focused more on general distinctions between keywords within a topic. This analysis is much more focused on the types of variations of keywords that we are seeing being grouped. These types of variations were categorised by, among others, Jennifer Slegg at The SEM Post.
The five types of variations that I've looked into for this analysis are the following:
- Initialisms/Abbreviations. For example, comparing SERPs for [BBC] and [British Broadcasting Corporation]
- Plurals. For example, [waffle maker] and [waffle makers].
- Verb stems with and without suffixes. For example, [calculate], [calculated] and [calculating].
- Keywords with and without punctuation. For example, [midnight's children] and [midnights children]
- Keywords with and without typos. For example, [heart rate monitor] and [heart rat monitor].
For each of these five categories, I put together a list of 50-100 keywords, along with a variation for each. Within these keyword pairs I investigated whether or not Keyword Planner reported the same volume, and also used the rank tracking tool STAT to see what pages are ranking for each keyword.
From that analysis, I was able to measure the prevalence of grouping keyword volumes within each category (i.e. the percentage of keyword pairs that have grouped volumes), and the similarity of the SERPs (the number of top ten results that were shared between the two keywords) for grouped and ungrouped keyword pairs.
Results
The results for those metrics are the following:
I also looked at how common it is that SERPs are exactly identical, that is that the top ten results are the same pages, in the same order. This showed an interesting pattern. There are only two categories with significant numbers of identical SERPs—Punctuation and Typos. In the case of keywords with and without punctuation, you are more likely to see identical SERPs (implying that Google sees the pair of keywords as identical) if keyword volumes are grouped than if they are not. This is not a hard-and-fast rule though – there are still some ungrouped keywords which have identical SERPs.
In the case of Typos, there are no grouped keyword pairs at all that have identical SERPs. Given also the low prevalence of grouped keywords in this category, it appears that the identical SERPs are coming from "showing results for" SERPs, where Google replaces results for the mistyped keywords with the correct one.
What conclusions can we draw?
- The prevalence of keyword grouping is highest for plurals, and very low for typos
This may be a result of the sample of keywords used in this study, but overall, around 50% of keywords in the sample are grouped. This indicates that, although this volume grouping is a growing phenomenon in Keyword Planner data, it is not yet consistent across all SERPs.
- There is not a lot of difference between keywords that are grouped by Keyword Planner, and those that aren't.
This is a surprising result. The motivation for conducting this study was to confirm the suspicion that Google associating keyword volumes means that it also associates the search intent. This is comprehensively disproven by this data. There is no significant difference between grouped and ungrouped keyword pairs when it comes to SERP similarity.
The one group where there is a larger difference is the verb stems category. This is likely because there are many verbs where the present and past tense mean very different things, indicating different search intent. For example, the keywords [march] and [marched] have completely different intents due to the multiple meanings of the word 'march.' This means that there's no chance that these SERPs will be similar. On the other hand, some verbs have little intent difference between past and present forms (for example [admire] and [admired]). These types of keyword pairs generally have grouped volume, and also have more similar SERPs.
- Overall, there is not a very high rate of similarity of SERPs for similar keywords
When starting this analysis, I expected to see much higher rates of similarity between very similar keywords. This is not the case, and to me that is surprising for two reasons. The first is that, as mentioned above, I saw the grouping of keyword volumes to be a clear signal that the keywords were seen as identical intents. This appears not to be the case.
The other reason is that I have a lot of faith in how smart Google is. Its developments in natural language processing and intent assessment give me the impression that it is able to associate similar keywords in the results it shows.
It may be that things are heading in this direction, but it's too early for it to have been fully implemented. The alternative explanation would be Google is that smart, and can interpret the subtle difference between keywords with incredibly similar content.
What should we take away from this?
What does this mean for SEOs doing keyword research? Rank tracking companies such as STAT are looking into ways of splitting keyword volumes between the constituent keywords, so there is hope for at least semi-accurate volume data. What it does mean is that we should ignore the grouped volumes when targeting keywords—just because keywords are given the same volume, it doesn't mean you shouldn't target them individually on your site.
On a wider scale, this tells us something about how the anthropomorphised "Google" thinks and works. There are two very separate factors at work here—what Google tells us, and what we actually see. This is something Rand picked up on in his recent Whiteboard Friday, and it applies across all of search—Google tells us one thing, but search rankings don't necessarily behave the same way. This backs up my belief to never take anything at face value, and always do your own research.
Do these results surprise you as much as they do me? Let me know in the comments.
Howdy Sam and thanks for the post. We've been working hard on this problem at Moz, and Russ + our KW Explorer team have come up with some pretty novel ways to use clickstream data to reverse out which keywords Google's grouping and split them into the proper volume buckets. That data's inside the tool now, but I'd love to know if your experience with Explorer or other keyword research tools (I believe there may be some using their own volume methodologies) have been positive? We're obviously English-language centric for now, and more accurate in the US than other places (due to the data's bias), but hope that this is something that can help solve the problem long-term for marketers, and make all of us less reliant on Google alone.
Hey Rand, thanks for your feedback! I really love Keyword Explorer and the volume data it gives seems to be accurate, but the major difference between it and Keyword Planner is scale - when I need to get volume data for 1000+ keywords it's not quite up to the job. My most common workflow is to upload a list of keywords to a rank tracking tool (we use STAT at Distilled) for one day, which gives volume data based on KW planer. I suspect this volume data is not at accurate as Moz's (although STAT say they are working on it), but it's the easiest way to get the data at scale.
Gotcha - so the 750 keywords per upload limit is stopping you from using KW Explorer? We've got some challenges handling larger uploads all at once, but I'll see what I can do.
I've had exactly this problem recently, too - I often need to get volume lookup for keyword/region/device lists between 10k and 100k long, and at the moment paying ~$0.003 per keyword on STAT is the easiest way to do this for me.
This is quite an enterprise-specific problem though, and I wouldn't hesitate to use KW Explorer for smaller sites.
Makes sense. STAT's definitely a great product -- no reason not to use them for this at such a scale.
Hi Rand / Sam,
I also feel that google is going to get more and more conservative (as if they aren't already) in terms of sharing data. Google started by hiding keywords traffic data in Google Analytics, there are many high volume keywords in Google Adwords which would show up as "no data" and there are many more examples where they have started hiding information.
What I am implying, whether it's relevant to rely on Google tools too much? Moz should be more focused on developing more independent tools, which remain relevant without being dependent on Google tools.
What do you say?
Regards,
Vijay
Hi, Rand. We've been analyzing this issue and many tools have gone from exact search volume to ranged. Yur solutions looks really great, a lot better than a popular one – running a campaign to get better data. It's pointless until google officially states the budget limits and etc, so we can know if its worth it. We're still pulling precise search volume from Google with a few workarounds, if you're interested, here's how our data compares to that of google:
top row shows Google's new ranges, below are cap points that we get within these ranges.
Rand Fishkin@ I posted this on John Doherty article but will copy again for your comments ref "less reliant on Google" Alexa & Siri [in my ear] IoT voice activation systems will eat into market share. The linguistic capabilities are limited to short Q&A's "Alexa travel insurance to India" will this mean the relevance of generic terms is stronger as the IoT systems develop aggregate like 4 like platforms [less brands] ? It would make sense for front of till and the public ?
Back in the day the Moz guys gave me some great advice that I implemented before I sold the company. Whereby a chosen number of TLD's in a particular area of commerce would be developed as authoritative platforms specific to the root domain which then serves (and persists) the common elements of a new aggregate brand carried by the platforms. Thinking this would hold true again today ?
"Rand Fishkin what say you" appreciate yours & Sam Nemzer feedback
feedback
It means google is pushing towards adwords!
In saying that, there's a post on reddit that covers how you can revert back to the original keyword tool groupings and volumes.
Yeah i noticed grouping and it's def going to be a problem. Hopefully semrush or similar tool will find a way to find the kw volume so we can at least take data from there. AS far as how much SERP is affected, i noticed inconsistency. IN some cases yes similar kws' like plurals may have same rank but in some cases not.
What I find surprising is that Google is narrowing down further the ability to perform accurate keyword research and analysis, where "not provided" was the previous one.
Organic traffic is not enough of interest and paid is getting even more in focus.
Google should be communicating with their upgrades and changes, to set a course for where the future is heading. This I find not the case here. It seems that Google is doing one thing and saying another.
They have admitted the use of Rankbrain in the engine and we would believe this has become intelligent enough to rank og produce SERP which would confirm our suspicion of intelligent algorithms.
Since this is not verified I am astonished by the change at this point, but of course, we may see the thin red line eventually.
Exactly. Google is becoming just like Facebook. Really trying to limit the professional's ability to utilize free traffic and push everyone to paid strategies.
As an advertiser I'm experiencing great difficulties with these last changes in Keyword Planner. Even with my campaigns running, I cannot see search volumes for keywords the way they were shown before. I'm seeing more and more 3rd party tools that parse data from Google don't have that kind of problem:
https://forums.seochat.com/keyword-research-30/goog...
Will Moz address this this any time soon?
Moz's Keyword Explorer does have volume data that doesn't come directly from KW Planner. Rand addressed this in his comment above.
It seems like one could look at this one of two ways:
1. Better for searchers
This is the latest step in Google forcing publishers to focus less on narrow, long-tail keyword articles. This could encourage better, broader, more comprehensive resources in search results... the opposite extreme from the previously vanquished micro-niche sites and content farm articles, which were hyper-targeted on certain keywords.
2. Better for Google.
This is Google moving toward pay-to-play a la Facebook, as has been mentioned above.
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Thanks Sam :-)
This is really interesting, thanks for sharing, Sam! I love how Google is constantly evolving, but it does make things so much harder to rank for! I've always tried to create content around questions that people may be asking, in the way that they ask them, and that's been working well so far! But i'd be interested to see where it goes next, is Google already ranking based on how generations search for things? So for example, Generation X would (in most cases) use different search terms to Millennials etc. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Hello Sam. I've been experiencing this with my adwords keyword planner for past couple of weeks. I was quite surprised and at first, I thought I was the only one getting such results. Seems like now I'm getting the idea behind this change and how it is working.
Hi Souvik. I'm glad I could help shed some light on the issue.
Simply awesome! Have been looking for a solution to this problem? Thanks for suggesting what needs to be done...
Thank you Sam, for this really wonderful post. I noticed there were some formatting issues though :P
Yes, we should do our own research before making a decision.
Then again to change our strategies to do SEO. We'll have to dig deeper to choose our keywords, and better select them in context ...
I feel this is way more non-relevant these days with so many other tools out there like SEMRush, Spyfu, Similar Web, etc where I can look at competitors and similar sites already in my niche and see what keywords bring them the most traffic (paid and organic) and what pages are getting that traffic.
Using that data I have a clear understanding of what is already working in my niche/industry...then I can also drop a few bucks on a broad based PPC campaign (broad modified, Phrase, etc) and let it run for a week and see exactly what other long-tail keywords people are searching for and optimize my website further from this data.
Then as Google Webmaster Tools starts populating data in the Search Analytics tab I can see a variety of other keywords people are searching for related to my site and optimize further.
I can do all this without touching keyword planner...so although it sucks that it changed...it is still not that big of deal in my opinion for anyone not to be able to accurately find keywords to optimize for.
Thank you sam, for sharing the valuable information giving an idea to consider grouped keywords properly while making seo.
It becomes work more difficult but at the same time much more interesting. On the one hand Google wants to attract website owners to Adwords (Oh, this eternal struggle Search Engines with SEO:) ). On the other hand Google wants to improve quality of search results: LSI, RankBrain and now Grouped keywords search volume - all this innovations are all the links of one chain. We are working in very interesting times!
Definitely noticed this new addition last time I was doing some research for relevant keywords based around the dental field. It seemed that this new feature was extremely limiting when choosing keywords to feature for blog posts. Because the area that the dental office is located does not have a massive population, average monthly searches for dental implants changed from 30-60, and this is a significant jump due to the new grouping feature. I am not sure what this jump in data means for the potential traffic to the site.
Definitely seems more AdWords oriented now. Thanks for sharing.
Great article , but I don't understand the meaning of prevalence of keyword grouping , can you explain ?
Great article, interesting read. And strange enough it's all these "Little" things that makes the huge differences in one's results. That is why I find S.E.O so Fascinating. It's amazing how the smallest change can mean the biggest shift in results. Thanks for sharing, I'm bookmarking this one...
The plural/singular thing started with Hummingbird a few years back. As Google gets better at identifying search queries that mean the same thing intent wise, I expect to see the diversity of SERP sets for common theme searches to diminish (searches that have the same intent, whether that's buying a product or finding a hotel/motel/lodging, etc).
It is hard to move against Google because they always make people to follow what they want. You have to stop depending to them or just follow the flow. It is hard to catch up with them but we must because they are the largest search engine.
After reading this, I am wondering if the Competition of the keywords will also be affected when the Search Volume is being combined for the keywords?
Changes, changes and more changes. Google is getting smarter and we have to adapt our SEO practices to this. Observation and adaptation. Thanks Sam for this post! :D
I won't call it being smart, but being conservative. Google is hiding more and more things, making the things less and less transparent.
Wait a sec, Sam. Do I conclude from your article that the grouping of keyword volumes may not be having much of an effect for many people/sites?
Carl Kruse
It doesn't have any effect on any website. It just messes up keyword research and setting up the CPC campaigns.
Thanks Sam for sharing! Hopefully, I will be able to grasp this new feature and leverage it to my advantage.
A few years back I reckoned that a good way to group keywords could be by the similarity of the search results, the thinking being that within the top 50 there must be a reasonable number of common pages appearing that would show the phrases were related. Found pretty much the same as you though, even a simple little change like singular to plural could result in completely different results!
Thank you for doing the research on this! Here's what I'm clinging on to at this point: "just because keywords are given the same volume, it doesn't mean you shouldn't target them individually on your site."
Hi Sam,
Thanks for the post.
How do we address grouping of keywords while conducting an initial keyword research. How do we change our approach so that we don't group too many keywords together so that we are able to identify similar keywords that are better targeted separately?
If you have any resources that you would guide me to or thoughts that you could share, it would be helpful.
Goods Posting, for refrens. What if it is true that Google puts us increasingly more difficult in some SEO practices that were made previously. And I think (and forgive me who pronounces me from my ignorance), it has done for much abuse practices buy links, swap, etc.
I'm curious about the typos research Sam. The example 'heart rate monitor' and the typo 'heart rat monitor' is significantly different from misspelling 'hart rate monitor', as the typo represents more likelihood of a misspelling vs inserting a different word - thoughts?
Excellent Article
FirstPagePartners.com
I agree with your point that there is a lot of difference between keywords that are grouped by Keyword Planner. This gives a clear idea about the grouping by keyword volumes.
Thanks for more information about SEO.Keyword are more important for our website
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Do not forget that google has a great business with adwords and limiting the Keyword planet, we are trying that we use more payment platform
Google is becoming smarter. These changes are also grateful because thanks to them people increasingly drawn to search engines and users.
I won't call it being smarter, but being more conservative. Google is hiding more and more things, it's getting focused on making things less transparent and that literally means less responsible.
And this means we have to play smarter as marketers. Instinct, common sense, and the talent to come up with intelligent wild guesses are sure to be our weapons of massive optimization.
Good intelligence is relative. Perhaps more conservative or any other adjective I do not want to mention.
What if it is true that Google puts us increasingly more difficult in some SEO practices that were made previously. And I think (and forgive me who pronounces me from my ignorance), it has done for much abuse practices buy links, swap, etc.
Wow. I am very glad to know that someone out there really cared bout the changes in the keyword planner and placed some effort to clarify what's going on. Google's brain got us really confused these days and I've read posts regarding the keyword planner issue of not being able to use the tool.
However, I am still not used to seeing 1K, 10K, or 100K on the results. The format is ugly and I still prefer the old one. Well, I'm pretty sure Google has something in his mind so we have no choice but to go with the flow.
This realization will help me a lot anyway:
"just because keywords are given the same volume, it doesn't mean you shouldn't target them individually on your site"
Thanks, Sam.