You will be able to gather keyword ideas from several tools and treat volume and difficulty figures as rough estimates.
Mei Ling, the home baker in Punggol you may remember from Digital marketing foundations, looked up "custom birthday cake Singapore" in two keyword tools on the same afternoon. One said hundreds of people searched it each month. The other gave a figure several times larger. She had planned to decide which cakes to write about based on those numbers, and now she did not know which number to believe.
The honest answer is neither, exactly. Keyword tools are useful for finding searches you had not thought of, and rough for measuring how many people make them. This lesson covers where keyword ideas come from and how much weight their numbers can bear.
Some of the best sources are free and come straight from Google. Start typing a search into Google and autocomplete suggests ways to finish it, based on what people search. Type "birthday cake" and you may see suggestions with "delivery", "near me" or particular estates and flavours. The People also ask box on a results page shows related questions. Searches related to your query sometimes appear at the bottom of the page.
Google Keyword Planner, which sits inside Google Ads, suggests related searches and gives volume estimates. It is built for advertisers, so it leans towards searches people might pay to appear on, but it is a useful source of ideas for organic search too.
If your site is already in Google Search Console, its Performance report shows the actual searches that led to your pages appearing in results. These are not estimates. They are real queries, although Google leaves out some rare ones to protect privacy. Module 9 shows you how to read the report.
Paid tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush build their own databases of searches and estimate volume, difficulty and which sites rank. They are convenient for research at scale and for looking at competitors. They are examples here, not recommendations, and you can do this course without them.
Every volume figure you see is an estimate of how many times a search is made in a month. Keyword Planner often shows a range rather than a single number. Paid tools build their figures from their own data sources and models, which none of them publish in full.
So different tools disagree, and for a small market like Singapore they can disagree widely. A search made a few hundred times a month in Singapore gives every tool very little data to work with. One tool may show 90, another 400, and a third may show nothing at all. None of them is lying. Each is estimating from a thin sample.
Use the figures to compare searches within one tool and to spot obvious differences. If one search shows in the thousands and another in the tens, that difference probably reflects something real. If two searches show 140 and 210, treat them as about the same.
Most paid tools also give a keyword difficulty score, often out of 100. It is meant to show how hard it would be to rank for a search. Each vendor calculates it with its own formula, usually based on the links pointing to the pages that currently rank. It is not a Google measure, and Google does not publish anything like it.
That means a difficulty of 30 in one tool and 30 in another do not describe the same thing. Compare difficulty scores within a single tool only, and use them as a rough first filter. Your own reading of the results page, from lesson 2.2, Read the results page to confirm intent, is often the better guide. If the top five results are thin directory pages, a good local page has a real chance whatever the score says.
A common mistake is to chase the searches with the biggest numbers. For a small business, those are often informational searches made by people far from buying, and the results are full of large sites that are hard to displace.
A search with modest volume and clear buying intent can bring far more customers. "Custom birthday cake delivery Punggol" may show a small figure, or none at all, in every tool. But almost everyone who types it wants to order a cake soon, in an area Mei Ling can deliver to. Ten such visitors a month who are ready to order are worth more to her than hundreds reading a general article on cake trends.
The same logic held for Priya in module 1. "PSLE maths tips" may show more volume than "P5 maths tuition Tampines", but the second is far closer to a phone call.
When you look up the same searches in two tools, record both figures side by side, along with the date and the country setting. Where they differ by more than double, note it. You are not trying to work out which tool is right. You are learning how much uncertainty sits behind the numbers, so you do not plan your next six months around a figure that might be off several times over.
Choose two sources for the activity below. Keyword Planner and one other tool works, as does a tool and your own Search Console data if you have some. Look up ten of your 20 searches in both.
Look up ten of your searches in two tools, record the volume each gives, and note where they disagree by more than double.
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