Google's Keyword Tools Keep Getting Better :)

When Google switched to their new keyword tool a lot of advertisers were ticked off by how it went from being quite granular & focused to being more broad and presumptuous. It defaulted from allowing you to drill down in a specific area to assuming that you wanted to buy a broader basket of keywords than you asked for, which particularly doesn't make sense when you think about how Quality Score punishes irrelevant ads.

Based on user feedback / complaints they updated the tool to offer 3 different filters: more like this, include or exclude keywords, and a setting which makes the search optionally tighter if turned on.

Given the keyword categorization, localization, trending data, match type options, these new filters, handy CSV export options & all the data they offer it is becoming quite a great tool with a variety of unique use cases for market research. It's so efficient that you can do a lot of work in a couple minutes, but it's so addictive you can spend hours playing with it. :)

Unfortunately Google was recently one upped on this front - by Google! ;)

Google recently announced a new keyword tool built around estimating the size of various global markets. The regular keyword tool let you do this as well, but this new keyword tool allows you to compare market sizes (by search demand) side by side at a glance, and it also lists relevant related local keywords in other language which have roughly the same meaning. Awesome stuff Google!

Published: December 9, 2010 by Aaron Wall in seo tools

Comments

worldstage
December 9, 2010 - 12:45pm

I'm glad to know other people can lose hours playing around with the Google Keyword Tool. At first I didn't like the new platform but with the new filters you can drill down very focused on an exact match search. A couple of the domains I've registered using an exact match keyword phrase have been spot on in that the affiliate sites I've built using them have ended up on Google page 1 for that keyword phrase in a matter of a couple of weeks! Not too shabby!

Thanks for the tip about the Google Global Market Finder, I hadn't found that one yet!

eyewebmaster
December 9, 2010 - 3:12pm

This is a good tools for us as a webmasters. This tool will help us be more accurate in our task. Thank you!

braveheartdesign
December 9, 2010 - 5:33pm

As usual with Google keyword tools, the data is not accurate.

I ran a search for "Football Tickets" in Europe. Football being soccer, so I would expect the UK to show up first, followed by Germany, Spain and Italy.

Instead Google tells me that the biggest keyword opportunity is in Sweden with 99,00 searches, about 50% higher than in the UK and 3X the searches in Germany.

And not only does Sweden have the "highest" search volume it also has the highest Suggested Bid Price.

December 9, 2010 - 6:31pm

Hehehe. Yeah that does tend to be the downside.

Seems they like to have the data be a little off to force advertisers to set up test accounts. Not a big deal if one is running a thin arbitrage operation, but if one sets up a whole complex business infrastructure to find a goose egg that sucks. ;)

JohnRobbins
December 9, 2010 - 10:07pm

I use this tool all of the time for helping customers to understand my reasoning for keyword choice.

I may be a little over the top with what I am about to say next but,....If anyone on the planet has access to the best information about keyword demographic...It's Google.

If anyone can suggest keyword approach and usage based on fact.. It's Google.

A like to use the same keyword over and over when going through the SEO selling process. And that keyword is "Cuban Cigar(s)"

As I always do, I went to the keyword tool (new keyword tool) and plugged in Cuban Cigar. There was no significant change as far as I could see.

I feel like I can still use and trust the info Google is feeding me here.

And like Aaron said. Awesome stuff Google!

JohnRobbins

dazkraz
January 17, 2011 - 12:36am

I really like this tool but for some reason at least one of the ranks for a set of keywords are not matching the results I get from a manual search for those keywords. The options are using the same search engine "google.com.au". Can anybody help?

January 17, 2011 - 5:27am

Look for the tools to be more of a qualitative or rough relative answer rather than being a precise quantitative measure. Then with that data in hand you can test the market using Google AdWords. You could even point paid traffic at an informational page on some site just to get a test of the market response, or to a page on your site offering a way for people to further express interest in your offer.

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