subject: The Internet Marketer's Guide to Google's Keyword Research Tools [print this page] The Internet Marketer's Guide to Google's Keyword Research Tools
To get your online content to the top of the search engines, you'll need to find a niche for your subject matter. By doing some keyword research, you can find a niche by picking out a non-competitive keyword phrase that gets a respectable amount of searches. Google's keyword research tools can assist you in finding your niche by providing data on how many user searches there are for potential phrases and how many competing sites there are for that keyword. Google's three main keyword research tools are: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Wonder Wheel, and Google Insights.
GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD TOOL: Google Adwords offers a free keyword research tool available to everyone regardless if you are using Google's paid advertising methods or not. Find it at htt.ps://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can use it to find out how often your selected phrase is seeked out. Just enter your phrase and the tool will process how many local and global user searches there are per month, PPC competition, and local search trends. This is not the perfect tool and I would not rely on it solely to run a marketing campaign. For one, it doesn't supply SEO competition data. Seo Competition is the number of webpages in Google's index that contain a specific keyword phrase. In short, it's your overall competition for a keyword phrase. You will have to get this data on your own on each of your prospective keywords if you plan on using these google tools. (To get the SEO competition for a certain phrase you need to enter it within the search engine. When you do this, put your phrase in quotation marks.) The second drawback to this Google keyword research tool is that it supplies a limited number of precise alternate phrases. You can find other keyword research tools that will generate 800+ related keyword phrases but the adwords tool produces only 100 results.
GOOGLE WONDER WHEEL: A new resource Google offers is their Wonder Wheel tool. Although this tool was created primarily to arrange and simplfy search engine results, it also can be used for productive keyword suggestions.To access the Wonder Wheel tool, you'll enter your keywords in the search engine like usual. Once the results display, go over to the left column and click on "show search tools". After that, click on the (you guessed it) "wonder wheel" link. After the link is selected you will see your selected keyword or keyword phrase encircled by relevent terms (hence the wheel). If you click on one of these outside keyword terms it will be broken down into additional subcategories. This gives you an idea on some of the most searched-for phrases on the Internet.
GOOGLE INSIGHTS:"Insights" is an additional Google keyword research tool to help you spot trends. If you enter a specific term you get a line chart displaying the interest of that keyword over time along with a forecast of how many users may search for it in the near future. For instance when I entered "Ipod" into the Insights tool, I saw that the overall searches for "ipod" have been decreasing since it reached it's peak in 2005. I also noticed a huge rise of searches for that keyword around the holiday season. It's a good tool to see what's gaining and losing popularity.
IMPLEMENTING ADWORDS W WONDERWHEEL: When using Google keyword-research tools, I recommend using the Wonder Wheel to find some potential keyword terms first. Once you find some good ones, Google-search the phrases (within parnethesis) to get your SEO competition. If the SEO competition is manageable for you, go ahead and enter the term into the Adwords tool to get the user searches per month. In theory, you'll want to find that particular keyword with the highest amount of user searches compared to it's SEO competition. Happy Hunting!
