Why (And How) The Google AdWords Keyword Tool Should Be Used For SEO – A Case Study
Yesterday, reading one of my favourite SEO Blog I came across this interesting article by David Whitehouse: “Why The Google AdWords Keyword Tool Shouldn’t Be Used For SEO – A Case Study“. I have to say that I partly agree with David, everybody knows that this tool is far to return exact results, but, still, I think that we SEOs can use the The Google AdWords Keyword Tool in several ways.
- Keyword ideas
First and most important: the Google Keyword tool is a suggestion tool. Use it to get ideas. Don’t ever think that the number of searches are real. They are not. They are hints, suggestions.
- Variations
Even if the Google Keywords Tool is not returning exact number of searches, it may be useful to evaluate different variations of similar terms such as singular vs plural for instance: I don’t belive there are 14,800 monthly searches for “hostels in London” but I do believe there are more searches for “hostels in London” (plural) than for “hostel in London” (singular). If I need to target one, and just one of these two keywords I’ll go for the plural (other factors may be considered tho).
Trends
One of my favourite features of the Google Keyword Tool. In some industries it may be really useful to know when is the highest number of searches for a certain term. Once again I don’t believe there were 1,600 searches worldwide for “hostels Auckland” last January but I do believe there are more searches for this particular keyword in January than in July.
Languages
Name one keyword tool that is decent with languages. I am sure most SEOs will say that Keyword Discovery is the best one. Well, I love it when we are dealing with English keywords but, unless they have recently dramatically improved their international database, with all the other languages it is always been a greek tragedy. And in any case let say we need a keyword research in Urdu, in Hungarian or in Slovenian: it may be not perfect but the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is the only available keyword tool for lots of languages. Obviously in this case the help of a multilingual SEO agency won’t hurt as well.
A Case Study:
Let say that our company is in need to target English speaking travellers willing to stay in cheap accommodation and hostels in Sydney, Australia.
Which keywords should we consider? Hostel Sydney? for sure but singular or plural?
Cheap Hotels ? Cheap accommodations?…what else? Let’s give Google’s tool a last chance:
I’ve typed in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, “Hostel Sydney”, “Hostels Sydney”, “Cheap Hotels Sydney”, “Cheap accommodations Sydney” and I have selected “All Countries” as a Location and “English” as a Language.
The top 5 results are the following:
[cheap hotels sydney]: global average 6600 searches, top between October and February
[backpackers Sydney]: global average 5400 searches, top between November and February
[accomodation Sydney]: global average 5400 searches, top February
[hostel Sydney]: global average 4400 searches, top in November and December
[hostels Sydney]: global average 3600 searches, top in December
Can’t you see anything useful here? Not only we know (easy guess to be honest) that we need to plan our SEM strategy in order to be effective at very last at the beginning of Autumn but we have found a very interesting keyword (Backpackers Sydney) that we weren’t even considering. Further investigation will be needed but it is a good start don’t you think?
I am not here to defend Google (as I said recently I’m always very critical with the big G), and I am not saying that the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is the best keyword tool out there. It isn’t.
What I am saying is that we can find a useful way to use it for our daily SEO tasks. Combine it with Google Insights and Google Trends and it can make a decent set of tools.
Once again: it is not the invention to be important. It is the way we use it!
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I always prefer to use this tool because it gives me the local search volumes of a particular keyphrase from that i finally get the Keyword Effective Index for the selection of targeting keywords from a list of keyphrases.
It is annoying that the keyword volumes produced by Keyword Tool are faulty, but I agree that the tool is perhaps mainly intended for use in generating alternative keyword suggestions.
However, imo, it’s usefulness there is about to steeply decline when the ‘old’ Keyword Tool interface is removed at the end of August.
As I posted on that other thread, I did a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new (i.e., ‘beta’) and found the new produced extremely long, but essentially useless lists.
http://www.webbizgeek.com/review-new-google-keyword-tool-sucks/
I’d be interested to know if you’ve had similar results.
Good points, Davide. I followed you over here from the Dave Naylor blog. I’m an ‘International SEO’ like you, based in Ireland, and I think for the moment, Google Keyword Tools are the only ones we have that provide results for the regions we need to research for. After reading the other post I spent some time on Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) because logic seemed to show that the Search Based Keyword Tool (http://www.google.com/sktool) couldn’t be very representative. I checked one of our main phrases on sktool and it showed very few searches, on the AdWords tool it was one of the top searches. We get a good number of visitors through that phrase, so which tool will I use in future?!
I too came from the Dave Naylor Blog post and am interested in further discussing this issue- I think you guys are right that the new AdWords tool is terrible and I’m really hoping that Google renegs on it’s announcement, letting us keep the old forcelegacy=true version, but I highly doubt that will happen.
I also am not at all a fan of the Search Based Keyword Tool, as I find it cumbersome to deal with, and even though it provides “more accurate” organic volume estimates, I don’t think it’s as helpful in keyword generation. It’s too bad Google keeps hamstringing us Search Marketers, cause I’d love to be able to keep spending more and more money with them, but I’m not just going to guess and check for results!