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Google Keyword Tool

On September 27, 2010, in Marketing, SEO, by LuCuS

I’ve briefly mentioned this before in a few other posts, but I now want to focus a little more attention on it. Of all the tools Google has to offer, the Google Keyword Tool is one of the best to have in the search engine optimization tool box. Part of Google AdWords, Keyword Tool is a utility that helps us identify popular keywords found in web pages as well as keywords & phrases that users search for. Just like most of the other tools Google has to offer, Keyword Tool is also free which makes it ideal for those of us that would prefer not to spend any money in order to make money. So, let’s see how we can use Keyword Tool to help us in our SEO adventures.

If you already have an existing website, you can use the Keyword Tool to find out the keywords & phrases used on your site and how they compare with others. For example, go http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter your web address in the text field that says “Website”, then click the “Search” button. Keyword Tool will quickly index your website looking for all keywords and will return them in a list with similar keyword phrases. The results will have 6 columns.

The first column is the keyword phrases that closely match the keywords found on your website. You can click any of these keywords to do a Google search using those keywords so that you can see what websites are already listing under those keywords. This is good if you find a keyword you’d like to use and want to find out who your competition is.

The second column is a small image of a magnifying glass. Clicking this little guy will take you to the Google Insights for Search page where you can see how, when, and where this keyword is being used in the world and throughought the last 12 months. I will be writing an article entirely about Google Insights for Search, but for now, I’ll just mention that it is good for finding out the demographics for a particular keyword. For instance, Google Insights for Search will show you how popular a keyword is in every country as well as provide you with a nice chart showing the times of the year that this keyword is used. This is a big plus if you have products on your website that are holiday specific and you want to know who your customers are.

The third column is a simple progress bar showing you how much competition there is when dealing with that particiular keyword. I’ll explain this column a little later and will show you how to combine it with the next column for more useful information.

The fourth column is the “Global Monthly Searches”. This column shows you how many times this keyword is searched throughout the entire world in a single month (on average). Again, later on I’ll be explaining how to combine this column with the last to get some pretty useful information.

The fifth column is the “Local Monthly Searches”. Like the previous column, this column shows how many times this keyword is searched in a single month. However, instead of this column displaying the number of searches for the entire planet, it only shows the number of local searches.

The last column shows a small bar graph indicating how local searches trend. There are 12 bars which all identify each of the last 12 months. They show you how popular this keyword is in each of the months. Like before, if you have products that are holiday or seasonal specific, this chart will provide you with a quick overview of which months this keyword will be most effective.

Now, as I mentioned above, I want to draw your attention to columns 4 and 5. If you own and / or operate a blog, or any other kind of website, and want to know which keywords are most effective for your campaign, then these are the 2 columns you need to pay most attention to. For example, if you write for a blog, you’ll want to check these 2 columns for identifying how popular your chosen keywords are and how much competition you’re going to have before being successful with this keyword. Personally, I like to click once on the “Global Monthly Searches” title so that the results sort by this column. Clicking the column header once will sort the results with the highest number of searches on top. This tells me which of the keyword phrases in the list gets the most searches in a month on average. I then look at the “Competition” column to determine if this keyword is worth targeting for generating traffic to my blog. If the competition is high (or even sometimes medium), I’ll usually cruise on down to the next keyword. Just because a keyword gets a lot of hits, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to get your page seen in this niche. That’s why I try to stick with using keywords that have a high monthly search, but a low competition rate. This improves my chances of being successful with this keyword.

When creating websites for my new clients, and even when working on my own sites, I think it’s always a good idea to keep up with my competition. So, instead of putting my web address in the “Website” text field at the top, I’ll put in the web address of my biggest competitors to identify what keywords they are using for their campaigns. If you aren’t sure of who your biggest competitors are, simply go to http://www.google.com and do a search using the keywords you think will get traffic to your site. Then, copy their web address and paste it into the “Website” text field on this page.

If you have specific keywords that you want to target in your website or blog, you can enter those in the “Word or phrase” text field instead of inserting your web address in the “Website” text field. You can add multiple keywords or phrases by putting one per line and then clicking the “Search” button. Just like before, this will return the keywords you searched for along with any recommended keywords that are similar to the ones you entered. This is helpful for finding similar keywords that you can use on your website for generating traffic. Again, you’ll want to click the “Global Monthly Searches” column header to sort the results with the keywords with the most searches at the top. Then, you can take the first few keywords and use them in your campaign. Try to incorporate the content of your page around these keywords for relevancy.

If you are completely unaware of which keywords to use or what to search for, you can always get a list of keywords by picking from the list of categories on the left. I like using this when setting up websites for new customers as I am usually not very educated on the majority of my customers’ market areas. So, I like to come here to begin my research. I’ll usually flip through several categories that my customers’ companies fall under until I find enough keywords that I’ll design their website around and will take those keywords back to propose to the customer.

You now know how to use Google Keyword Tool for picking your keywords and researching the competition. In my next article, I will share with you other techniques for researching your competition and finding ways to beat them at their own game. Until then, go ahead and play with the Google Keyword Tool by entering your website, keywords you use in your website, or picking from the list of categories on the left.