Our last article featured several SEO Tools. However, the tool featured today is so important, we’re giving it our full attention in this article.
How do you choose the best SEO keywords for your site? Choosing the proper keywords for your site my seem overwhelming, or it may seem easy. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t fret. If you think you already know the best keywords for your website, you may be very wrong. This post will show you how to take advantage of one of the best keyword resources on he Internet. The best part: it’s FREE!
The tool I’m talking about is the Google Keyword Tool. The Google Keyword Tool is a feature included in the Google AdWords program. While it does cost money to run Google AdWords, it is free to join the program, and you don’t have to spend money to use the Google Keyword Tool.
Once you’ve signed up for a free Google AdWords account and sign in, you’ll arrive at the Dashboard. Click on the Reporting and Tools tab and select Keyword Tool. Find the box labeled Word or Phrase and type in the keywords you think are best for your site. Find the box labeled Website and put in the URL of your site (optional). Once you’ve completed those steps, click on the Search button.
Now you will see two sections. The first section is labeled Search Terms and gives you information about the specific terms you typed into the Word or Phrase box. The second section is labeled Keyword Ideas and lists Google’s suggested keywords. Next to each keyword you will find a green bar that shows how competitive that keyword is in the AdWords market. This gives us some insight into how many people are bidding on that keyword. However, it does not give us a full picture of how many people are optimizing their websites for that term. In other words, if I own a pet store I may optimize my site for the keyword “Dog Collar,” but that does not mean that I’m also paying for the AdWord “Dog Collar.”
The next column is labeled Global Monthly Searches, and it is very helpful. This tells you how many times that keyword is searched for on Google. You can click on any of the column headers and sort that column in ascending order. Click the column header again to sort it in descending order.
This tool is great because it helps you figure out what people are searching for. Let’s look back at our pet store example. Let’s say that I own a pet store and I don’t call it a collar, but a restraint. Restraint is what it is called by pet industry insiders, my vendor calls it a restraint, and the packaging even calls it a restraint. So when I start making a list of keywords for my site, I might naturally choose the keyword “Dog Restraint.” However, the Google Keyword Tool tells me that there are only 4,400 monthly searches for that term. It turns out, most people actually use the term “Dog Collar,” and the Google Keyword tool tells me there are 673,000 monthly searches for that term. With those facts in mind, which keyword should I optimize my site for? Dog Collar, of course!
You may think that this is over simplifying an obvious search term, but I can tell you from experience that you will not choose the best keywords for your site without the Google Keyword Tool. Recently I was working on a site and input a list of keywords into the tool. It turns out, one of the words at the top of the list was not a very popular term. After going through the list of Keyword Ideas, I found a keyword that was being searched several hundred thousand times more per month, AND it had very little AdWord competition! I never would have found that valuable keyword without the Google Keyword Tool.
Here’s one final reminder. As I mentioned in a previous article, do not try to make every page rank for every keyword. The goal of this exercise is not to overload a page with every search term that receives a lot of monthly searches. You must still choose your keywords carefully.
