• About Us
  • Contributors
  • Guides
  • Speaking Engagements
  • Write for The SEM Post
  • Submit a tip or contact us!
  • Newsletters

The SEM Post

Latest News About SEO, SEM, PPC & Search Engines

  • Google
  • SEO
  • Mobile
  • Local
  • Bing
  • Pay Per Click
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • State of the Industry
You are here: Home / Google / Google’s Keyword Planner Now Combines Keywords for Search Volume

Google’s Keyword Planner Now Combines Keywords for Search Volume

June 28, 2016 at 6:28 am PST By Jennifer Slegg

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Evernote
  • SMS

keyword planner search variantsGoogle’s Keyword Planner has been a staple for both advertisers and SEOs to get an idea of traffic volume for keywords.  This helps identify the keywords with the most traffic as well as identify keywords that have lower volume, which often means less competition.  But a major changes to Google’s Keyword Planner has made those traffic volume estimates much less valuable.

Last week, Google made a change to the tool where instead of showing individual keyword estimates for each keyword or keyword phrase, Google is now lumping in the data together, meaning Google will show identical estimates for similar keywords or keyword phrases – advertisers will recognize this as Google combining search variants.  You can no longer see individual estimates to see which of those has the highest volume and which the lowest, and valuable aspect for both advertisers and SEOs who are choosing which keywords to target based on volume .

This also has another major implication.  For those that don’t notice the change – or worse, pulling the data from tools that haven’t updated to take into account the change – this means that some advertisers and SEOs are grossly overestimating those numbers, since many tools will combine data, and there is no notification alert on the results to show that how Google calculates average monthly searches has been changed.  So the data could erroneously be combined, instead of noting that the estimates Google is provided are combined already for many, leading SEOs and advertisers to think search volume is far higher than it really is.

For example, here are the results for two keywords – SEO and search engine optimization.  Instead of reporting individually, they are now showing identical data, even though previously it showed the data individually.  For someone not paying attention, they could believe that these two individually have a search volume of 1,346,000 average monthly searches total.  But in reality, it is SEO and search engine optimization TOGETHER that have 673,000 monthly searches.

keyword planner 1

However, there is even more problems.  There could also be ADDITIONAL keywords that are included in that 673,000 figure, but the Keyword Planner does not state this.  So estimates could be significantly off for someone thinking the total search volume just for “search engine optimization” keyword alone is 673,000 per month.

The Keyword Planner now seems to combine many search variants, including:

  • plurals with non-plurals for any word in the keyword phrase
  • acronyms with longhand version
  • stemming variants: -er, -ing, -ized, -ed etc keywords (ie. designer, designing, designed)
  • words that can be spelled with or without space (ie. car park and carpark)
  • words with and without punctuation (ie. kid toys and kid’s toys)

In some ways, it does make sense that Google is showing close variants with the same data.  But for some advertisers and SEOs, sometimes those close variants can have vastly different “real world” results, even if Google is now lumping them together.

This change could be connected to the fact Google also began restricting access to the Keyword Planner tool to those with active AdWords campaigns only, a decision they later seemed to backtrack on, changing the “requirement” to a “bug”.   And with Google using close variants in AdWords, then perhaps this change makes sense.  But for those who use it as a keyword volume tool, the value of this tool just diminished significantly.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Evernote
  • SMS
The following two tabs change content below.
  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Google+ profileMy LinkedIn profile

Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Google+ profileMy LinkedIn profile

Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)

  • 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
  • Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
  • Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
  • New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
  • Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020

Filed Under: Google, Pay Per Click, SEO

Sign up for our newsletter


Comments

  1. Joe says

    June 28, 2016 at 1:28 pm

    Is there a setting we can use to seoerate the two?

    • Jennifer Slegg says

      June 28, 2016 at 1:29 pm

      Nope 🙁

      • Joe says

        June 28, 2016 at 1:53 pm

        Doesn’t this hinder our PPC friends too?

        • Jennifer Slegg says

          June 29, 2016 at 5:58 am

          AdWords does search variants now for advertisers.

  2. Steve says

    June 28, 2016 at 2:33 pm

    I discovered this a couple of days ago. Two people at AdWords have given me different views: one of them (via Twitter DM) thinks it’s a bug but is having trouble confirming internally, while another (via phone support) ignored my question and said that if I want accurate data, I should run some actual campaigns and get the impression numbers, and to also give AdWords’ Campaign Experiments a try.

    Classic Google: two people giving two different answers, while one of them says you now have to pay to get the data you want. Rubbish,

    I’ll report back if I get a solid answer from someone either way. Have you had it confirmed to you by someone at Google, Jennifer?

    • Troy Fix says

      June 29, 2016 at 8:21 am

      It’s under “Close Keyword Variations” – https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497836?hl=en.

      In Google’s example, they say: For example, if your phrase match keyword is “kid’s scooter,” you’d still want to show your ad when someone searches for “kids scooter” or “kid scooters.”

      My issue is it isn’t consistent. If you look at “bachelor degree” & “bachelor degrees”, they have 90K searches/month. The keywords “bachelors degree” & “bachelors degrees” have 18K searches/month.

      I don’t disagree with what Google is trying to do. However, the tool isn’t giving consistent data, So when everyone tries to prioritize or do projections, they’re going to be waaaay off.

  3. Oli says

    June 28, 2016 at 2:52 pm

    I don’t think this is necessarily a completely bad thing, semantic indexing means we should be talking about topics over keywords, this helps give us traffic levels without getting stuck in the keyword mindset.

    While it’s better to look at specific keywords for sure, this might actually push us towards a higher focus on content instead of keywords.

    • Dawid Sakowski says

      June 29, 2016 at 11:43 pm

      You still could get some useful data from “Detailed forecast” feature of Keyword Planner.
      Add both keywords to your plan, set your bid to $100 and download including impressions, clicks and forecasts.

      Your example (seo, search engine optimization) gives the following results:
      – [seo] –> impressions 476,174.97
      – [search engine optimization] –> 43,825.05

  4. jason says

    June 28, 2016 at 5:46 pm

    Would you say that this follows Google’s transition with its original Hummingbird update, where they focus less on the keyword itself and more on the true user intent?

  5. Lorenzo Solis says

    June 29, 2016 at 12:33 am

    It has a positive point of view. Now we’re going to know how different terms are semantically connected.

  6. Suresh says

    June 29, 2016 at 3:17 am

    Hope we can see that data using the SEMRUSH.

  7. C says

    June 29, 2016 at 7:07 am

    Thanks for this post! Great to know, I use that tool a lot. Seems like every day Google pushes users more and more towards PPC. Sad stuff, but I guess it makes sense from business point of view.

  8. Ash Nallawalla says

    June 29, 2016 at 4:15 pm

    Good pickup. This isn’t happening with some sets of noncommercial keywords, e.g. raaf, royal australian air force, – but happens for USAF, united states air force.

  9. MeshCloud says

    June 29, 2016 at 9:01 pm

    I have used google keyword planner to send over 200,000 words for a project to determine the highest volume ‘ideas’ and concepts. I find this interesting and possibly helpful, because I was frustrated that I would have to send every variant of a word in order to get a relative idea of it’s popularity.

    I guess I was using the tool already in the way that google now intends for it to be used. That is to find a language to describe something using popular words and topics. I’m not looking for exact keywords to stuff in an article. But rather to determine if people use the word abstract or modern more when describing a funky vase.

Newer Comments »

Trackbacks

  1. Keyword Planner - Grouping Search Volume for Close Variants? says:
    June 28, 2016 at 7:07 am

    […] much toast for keyword research – be careful if you're using it or any tools which rely on it. Google's Keyword Planner Now Combines Keywords for Search Volume And the loophole I found a few weeks ago has been […]

Founder & Editor

Jennifer Slegg (2052)

Sign up for our daily news recap & weekly newsletter.


Follow us online

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Linkedin
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Latest News

2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates

We finally have the first Google Quality Rater Guidelines update of 2022, and like usual, it is … [Read More...]

Recent Posts

  • 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates
  • Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update
  • Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update
  • New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met
  • Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters
  • Analyzing “How Google Search Works” Changes from Google
  • Google Quality Rater Guidelines Update: New Introduction, Rater Bias & Political Affiliations
  • Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines: Reputation for News Sites; Video Content Updates; Quality for Information Sites
  • Google Makes Major Changes to NoFollow, Adds Sponsored & UGC Tags
  • Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines Targeting E-A-T, Page Quality & Interstitials

Categories

  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Amazon
  • Apple
  • Bing
  • Branding
  • Browsers
  • Chrome
  • Content Marketing
  • Design
  • Domains
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Firefox
  • Foursquare
  • Google
    • Analytics
    • Google RankBrain
    • Quality Rater's Guidelines
  • History of Search
  • Industry Spotlight
  • Instagram
  • Internet Explorer
  • Links
  • Local
  • Mobile
  • Native Advertising
  • Other Search Engines
  • Pay Per Click
  • Pinterest
  • Publishers
  • Security
  • SEO
  • Snapchat
  • Social Media
  • State of the Industry
  • The SEM Post
  • Tools
  • Twitter
  • Uncategorized
  • User Experience
  • Video Marketing
  • Week in Review
  • Whitepapers
  • Wordpress
  • Yahoo
  • Yelp
  • YouTube
June 2025
MTWTFSS
« Aug  
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30 

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in