Using The Google Keyword Tool

By Ricky Dawn Wednesday, 8th June 2011

The Google keyword tool is a great asset when doing your keyword research, it allows you to view the search volumes, keyword competition and estimated cost per click.

When doing keyword research you need to look out for some specific things to determine whether the keyword is worth targeting. The first thing you look at is the search volume. You need to know this so you can determine whether the keyword is worth targeting or not, if the keyword only gets 10 searches per month its fairly safe to say you’ll be wasting your time.

The next thing you need to look at is the competition. If the competition is high then it is going to take a lot of hard work breaking into the first page. If you’re trying to break into a very competitive market like ‘Website Design’ for example you will probably see better results targeting long tail keywords such as “php based web design” or “your town web design”.

The best tool to use for keyword research is without a doubt: Google Keyword Tool

If you haven’t already I would recommend signing up for a Google account, this will allow you to view more keywords, and will save you having to type in the Captcha every time you want to use it!

How to use the Google Keyword Tool

The Google keyword tool is probably the most powerful keyword tool there is available, it’s fairly easy to use but there are a few things some people miss out when using it for research, so I’m going to show you how I use it.

The first thing you need to do when you’re logged in, if you’re targeting a specific country, is set it to the desired location. You do this in the ‘Advanced Options and Filters’ tab.

When you have clicked the tab you need to select your country and language. If you have a mobile version of the site it might also be worth checking out the mobile statistics, you can find this option under the ‘Show Ideas and Statistics for’ .

After you have set up the Google keyword tool to the correct location and language, you’re ready to input your keywords. If you are unsure of what keywords you want to target you can use the ‘Website’ option, this allows you to just put your URL in and it will return you some keywords that Google thinks your site matches.

Sometimes this is not very accurate, especially if you have an e-commerce store (it works great for blogs), but if you put in just a few keywords like ‘web design surrey’ and ‘website design’ then it will return you lots of keywords that are in the same niche.

Once you have put some keywords in, click search and you’re away.

When you have clicked search you will see a list of your keywords along with some recommend ones from Google, before you look at the keywords too much you need to set it to ‘Exact match’, you will find this box on the left hand side.

This will show you the true value of each keyword. Without doing this you only see the search volumes for the broad keyword which is usually entirely different. Once you have done this you can now look at your keywords, the keywords inside the [brackets] are the exact keywords, these are the main ones you want to look at.

As you can see, the difference in search volume between the exact and broad is massive. When it’s a broad keyword result it takes all the keywords with the keyword you are looking for into account. For example the keyword you’re researching is “wordpress hosting” when using the broad keyword it will also include all the searches from keywords like “best wordpress hosting” and “cheap wordpress hosting”. This is why it is always better to use the exact option.

However, the broad option does have its uses mainly when doing research on a market you are not to familiar with. You can use it to determine how popular that market is without having to have a huge list of keywords. You can simply put “Website Design” and it will show you how many people search for “Website Design” even if that is not all that they type. This is why I always have them both checked so I can keep an eye on the popularity of the market as well as the terms I want to rank for.

Another good way of finding keyword terms that work is to do some analysis on your competitors. I use the Open Site Explorer tool for this. Open site is easy to use, just follow these steps:

1. Enter URL

2. Click Search

3. Click Anchor Text Distribution

The anchor text distribution page shows all of the anchor text used, these are usually the keywords your competition are trying to target and if they are targeting them chances are they work.

This is just a beginner’s guide to the Google keyword tool. If you have any specific questions that are not answered in this post please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you!

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