Google Keyword Tool < The Organic SEO

Google Keyword Tool

1 Oct 2007 at 17:06 by Joshua J. Steimle

Sure, the Overture Inventory Tool or Overture Keyword Selector was great, relatively speaking, and free, but the thing never worked that well, and occasionally, as in lately, doesn't work at all. Enter the Google Keyword Tool. As far as free SEO tools go, this is one of my favorites.

As with most things Google, the keyword tool is pretty easy to use. You type in a keyword or keyword phrase, click on "get more keywords," and then it will pull up a list of related keywords. Most importantly, it gives you some data on average search volume and you can also view search volume trends for the past 12 months.

What was nice about Overture's Inventory tool was that it gave you specific numbers, so you didn't just know there were more searches for one keyword than another, you knew there were 20,000 searches for one and 100 for the other. But then again, was Overture's keyword tool data reliable? Somewhat, but not entirely. But still, it was better than the little bar Google gives us, but hey, I'm just happy they give us anything at all, so I'll take what I can get.

How do I use the tool? Well, I run an SEO firm, right? So I can type in "seo" and "search engine optimization" and get a list of keywords like this:

flash seo
free search engine optimization
free seo
free seo tool
free seo tools
organic search engine optimization
organic seo
phpbb seo
professional seo
real estate seo
and...so forth

Well, I'm not giving anything away for free, I don't really get into seo for real estate types, and frankly, many of these terms are too competitive for my short-term needs. So how do I make my life easier? By limiting myself geographically. You see, my business is a Utah-based SEO company, and if I try to come up in the rankings for "utah seo" that's much easier than trying to get a #1 spot for just "seo" by itself. So let's add the word "utah" to the Google Keyword Tool.

Well, that only pulls up four terms; utah seo, utah seo company, utah seo firm, and utah seo blog. All of those apply to me, but I'd like more terms please. So I type in "seo salt lake city" because my firm is located in a suburb of Salt Lake City, but all it gives me is that term back, with no data. The same goes for "search engine optimization salt lake city". So if I want to focus on Utah and the SEO related terms, I don't have too many keywords to focus on, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. What would be bad is if I were focusing on 30 terms related to Utah, not knowing that there are really only 4-5 terms that matter. Now I know, and I can use that knowledge to my advantage, and this is the same type of process we go through for our clients.

The Google Keyword Tool is just one small part of the puzzle. It won't tell you exactly what keywords to focus on to get rich. What it is good at is helping you come up with ideas for new keywords, as well giving you some information to help you prioritize keywords. But every company is different, every industry is different, and every website is different, and for those reasons the only real way to find out how to prioritize your keywords is through our old friend experimentation and his buddies trial and error.

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