Is there an uptick in keyword planner data being excluded for healthcare related terms?

[Ben Seidel]

Is anyone else noticing an uptick in the amount of keywords that are no longer returning any search volume (and competition data) from Google's Keyword Planner? We are noticing more and more keywords in the healthcare and alternative medicine industries being protected.
For example, the majority of chiropractor/chiropractic related keywords no longer return any data from Keyword Planner.
If you are seeing the same trend, how long ago did you start seeing these additional data being protected/not available?

Additionally has anyone found any great workarounds for the above?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@ibweb, that's probably a byproduct of Google's shutting out various procedures and branches of medicine from AdWords, especially in the last few years. Regenerative therapies (like stem cell therapy) are the big category that's been gored, though it's one example of many. If nobody's running ads on those terms because nobody's allowed to, then eventually the Keyword Planner data dries up.

By the way, I've always found Keyword Planner data pretty unhelpful. Sometimes it gives you a basic sense of where the action is, but that's about it.

 

[Ben Seidel]

@Phil Rozek thanks for the response. For SEO research we use a tool that provides data from multiple sources (i.e. Google Ads, Google Trends, Majestic, Moz, Calais and IBM Watson, etc.)
However, we still like taking a look at the search volume data and keyword suggestions that pull via Google Ads keyword planner API.
However, that's becoming far less useful for alternative medicine categories like chiropractic/chiropractor related keywords. As we are seeing no data coming back from Google Ads on those keywords now.

@Phil Rozek what tools do you use for your keyword research? Particularly for companies in the health industry?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@ibweb, mostly running a small AdWords campaign as a weather balloon + studying Search Console.

I describe my approach in the blog post titled "10 Better Ways to Do Keyword Research for Local SEO."

 

[Ben Seidel]

@Phil Rozek thanks for your feedback.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@ibweb, my pleasure. One sidebar to what I mentioned before: I've found the best (or least-bad) keyword-research method depends mostly on whether your goal is (a) to find phrases you overlooked, or (b) to gauge volume/popularity of phrases you already know about.

For the latter there's no substitute for running AdWords on some broad-match or phrase-match terms and just seeing what shows up in the net. For the former it's more a matter of cobbling together various approaches (like those I mentioned in the post).