Keyword Research Tool Review: Google AdWords

Keywords are important. I’ve heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other “professionals” who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need.
Here’s the thing. Keywords are language. They’ll always be important because words are how we communicate with each other.
So until someone invents the microchip that can be implanted in your brain and read your thoughts without using words, you’ll need to think about language in marketing. And I can only hope that those potential clients were told this by one seriously misguided vendor.
With the ubiquitous need for keywords, there are a lot of tools out there that claim to do keyword research better. So I present to you, a series on Free Keyword Tools!
Let’s start with the Google Keyword Tool. This is what we all use, and like it or not, it’s the best free tool available. It’s tied directly into Adwords, and it uses search frequency from Google (although that’s debatable, see below). If you don’t sign in with an Adwords account, you’ll have to enter the captcha every time you want to do a search.
Lately, I’ve been seeing the captcha show up even when I’m logged in though, so you may not be completely free of this annoyance. By the way, it’s free to set up an Adwords account, and you don’t have to have anything live in it to be able to use the keyword tool.

Cool Features Of The Google Keyword Tool

• The ability to switch from broad to exact or phrase match volumes. This can really help identify which keywords you want to set on which match types, and for SEO, it can help to hint at which keyword phrase has the overall highest volume in a niche.
• The tool has lots of options for information about the keywords, which is somewhat hidden in the “columns” drop down menu – shown below. These are primarily designed for paid search, but they have some value in regular research as well.

Column options in the Google Keyword Tool

• Global vs. Local Monthly search volumes. The difference here is that one shows you only the local area you set up (defaulted to United States) and the other shows you volume for the entire world.
• Be cautious using Global when you really mean Local, otherwise you’ll get keywords like “handy” instead of “mobile phone” showing as they have a lot of volume, even though only Germans call it a “handy”. Adjust your local settings here:

Options in the Google Keyword Tool

• Approximate CPC and Competition are both useful for seeing what the competition is like for these keywords in the paid arena. It logically follows that those keywords would also be competitive organically or in any other context, and it can be a good way (along with volume) to make relative decisions.
• Local Search Trends is also pretty cool, as it takes data from Google Insights and displays it directly in the keyword tool. The bars that are shown represent the previous 12 months’ search trend. Here’s an example for “summer olympics 2012″ which clearly shows that interest in this topic has been increasing, just as we would expect.

Trends for "summer olympics 2012"

• Search Share and Extracted from Webpage seem like they’d be an SEO’s dream, but I’ve been unable to get this feature to work properly, even with an active Adwords account. In theory, these two data points would show you (respectively) when your site showed up in organic search for a given keyword and what webpages on your site already match this keyword. We can continue to dream, but I think it’s likely this feature will only work when you have an active Adwords account live – so you can decide whether or not to bid on a keyword in paid.
• The ad group ideas (beta) is really pretty cool. While I would never advocate using it to set up your ad groups, it can be very useful for categorizing keywords into niches. The fact that it saves your “ideas” and that you can check all keywords in a “group” at the same time makes me have to use those complicated excel formulas a bit less often.
• Include/Exclude terms allows you to really narrow things down. An example from real life – I was searching for “estate planning” terms, and didn’t want anything associated with real estate. By adding the word “real” into the exclude terms box, I got a nicely filtered list of just what I needed.
• The category drop down can also be useful, particularly when you’re doing work for a niche within a larger context. For example, I was doing some work for an attorney who helps with adoptions. By narrowing the category to “Law and Government”, I was able to take out all those keywords like “teenage pregnancy adoption” that aren’t relevant enough to the attorney trying to sell services.
• The “only show ideas closely related to my search terms” box is unchecked by default, but you may want to check it if you are working with some really general search terms. Basically, what this box does is require that the keywords the tool returns have at least one of your keywords in it. If you leave this box unchecked, you may get keywords like “car quote” when you search “car insurance”. If you leave the box checked, you won’t get keywords like “insure car”, so think carefully about whether you want to check this or not.
• Finally, the “Locations and Languages” feature under “Advanced Options and Filters” is a must for anyone doing international research. Maybe someday they’ll allow us to filter by region or state of the US too. That would be helpful.