These days there are a number of providers of search analytics data - that is, historic and ongoing data about keyword rankings and site performance across both paid and organic search. The data is extremely useful when evaluating both your own sites, and looking at competitors.Most of these tools provide an amount of free data, with a subscription plan to "unlock" more complete data.
We identified 6 sites offering this service, covering both SEO and PPC, and providing access to UK-specific data - all of which we're currently evaluating. Drumroll, please!
The Tools
| Service | Claimed database size |
|---|---|
| Search Metrics | 100 million |
| Keyword Spy | 127 million |
| SEMRush | 95 million |
| Sistrix | 10 million |
| iSpionage | 3 million |
| SpyFu | Unknown (over 1 billion "results") |
A few things to note about database size:
- The numbers are taken directly from the sites in question, and may not be up to date
- A large database may not contain keywords that are actually searched for. This would be a disadvantage, since it adds unnecessary time and complexity into crunching the data
- However, as long as there is quality control, a bigger database is better, since it will avoid gaps in data and allow for a more complete analysis
- All of the tools mention database size as a selling point or advantage
But how does this total database size translate into a real world situation? Is there enough data for a UK SEO to analyse a range of sites? Let's find out. We took a sample of 5 websites of different sizes and industries to see how the tools would perform.
UK Organic Keywords
This turned out to be no contest - Search Metrics had the most data for every website. If we assume they had 100% coverage, and work out an average for the other providers, here's our organic keyword data ranking:
| Service | Average coverage |
|---|---|
| Search Metrics | 100% |
| SpyFu | 47.1% |
| SEMRush | 35% |
| Keyword Spy | 24.6% |
| iSpionage | 16.5% |
| Sistrix | 13.3% |
Interestingly, both Search Metrics and SpyFu had similar traffic proportions across the sites - implying that it genuinely does reflect different database sizes. These proportions also reflect what we expected based on site sizes prior to gathering data.
UK Paid Keywords
A reversal in fortunes. This time, SpyFu had the most data for every website in our sample. And our averages:
| Service | Average coverage |
|---|---|
| SpyFu | 100% |
| Search Metrics | 43.0% |
| SEMRush | 30.5% |
| Keyword Spy | 28.0% |
| iSpionage | 18.3% |
| Sistrix | 3.4% |
This time, a switch in the top two, with SpyFu having the most data by a considerable distance. The sheer numbers, however might imply low value keywords that are not attracting search volume, But that's another question.
And the winner is...
We'll call this one a tie. Congratulations to Search Metrics (organic) and SpyFu (paid)!
But size isn't everything...
Of course, lots of bad data would mean lots of bad analysis, so stay tuned for our next instalment - data quality.
Have any comments or suggestions? Want to question our methodology or moral integrity? Then jump into the comments below!
Comments
reference keyword panels
Submitted by Sören Bendig (not verified) on
Hi Andy,
thanks for mentioning SEOlytics, though it seem a bit weird to include us in the charts with zero data - due to no reference keyword panel for UK (yet). Would look different for other countries like US, etc. ;)
Two important things to always keep in mind about those reference keyword panels:
a) update intervall of data (if the data is several month old its mostly good for keyword research)
b) If additional calculations are made on the keywords "known" for a single domain, "collateral keyword" (like eg. "terms of service") can distort the calculated data. So it's important to be able to check which keywords are included.
Best data and analysis you get with exact keyword sets specified by the user and then create your own aggregated panel.
Thanks for the reply, Sören!
Submitted by SEOThing on
Ah, you're right - we didn't intend to include SEOlytics in this round - as you say you don't have UK data yet. We forgot to remove you from the graphs, although we did remove from the tabular data - apologies! :)
One of the reasons you appear, is we also intend to evaluate other aspects of these tools.
You're quite right that data quality is key, and we intend to look at that aspect shortly.
Charts now updated
Submitted by SEOThing on
The charts have now been updated - this will appear once our caching servers have done their thing!
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