Google Keyword Popularity Tool

Where to Find Keywords?

There are a number of places you can get started to find out what popular keyphrases people are searching for in your industry, that you'll be able to use to optimize search campaigns for your website. The easiest place to begin is the free Google Keyword Popularity Tool provided by Google. You'll be able to tailor your results based on location (country) and language. The tool defaults to your area. For U.S. based users, this would be "English, United States." Click the edit link next to these to change them.

The Free Google Keyword Popularity Tool

Next, the Google Keyword Popularity Tool asks you the question "How would you like to generate keyword ideas?" You can select:

• Descriptive words or phrases (default)
• Website content

Since we're searching for how many times a user searches for a particular combination of search terms, leave the selection on the default - "Descriptive words and phrases." If you select "website content", you can enter a website page name (example.com/page) and the Google Keyword Tool will suggest keywords that are appropriate to that website. In other words, it will identify the content on the page you enter, and suggest keywords that are relevant to that page's content.

Next, you'll want to type in a sample keyphrase (combination of keywords) into the keyword box. Leave "use synonyms" checked, as this will give you more keyword options (it will include synonyms, ie. related keywords to your keyphrase in the results). See below for an example:

If you want, you can filter words you don't want to search for out of your results, by clicking the filter my results link, and entering keywords you don't want included. We should also point out that the Keyword Tool filters out adult content by default. If you want these keywords included, you'll need to check the corresponding box under the filter my results section.

So, at the time of this writing, what did our keyphrase - long tail search, return? Let's see:

Most of these results should be self explanatory. There was approximately 720 searches for the keyphrase "long tail search" in the month of January, in the United States, for users browsing using the English language. Globally (in all countries), the average search volume per month for "long tail search" is slightly higher, at 1000 searches.

What this basically means is, if a web page on your site is the #1 result for "long tail search", your website is hosted in the United States, and is written in English, you should get most of those 720 searches. You are likely to attract some of the global traffic as well, so you may get somewhere between 700 and 1000 visitors/ month for being the #1 result for "long tail search." How can you find out exactly how many searchers you're getting? Install Google's free Analytics software on your web pages. Read our article on advantages of Google Analytics to find out more.

Curious as to what long tail search is? Read our article on long tail keyword research to find out how you can optimize your pages to target specific keyword phrases, inside what's known as the long tail of search, that make up over 94% of all searches made. These keyphrases have much less competition than the more generic, high volume search phrases. By optimizing your long tail search campaign in conjunction with Google's Keyword Popularity Tool, you can increase the traffic to your site a lot more quickly and efficiently, and at less cost.

Google Keyword Popularity Tool - Hidden Columns

What you may not realize at first is that, by default, some columns are hidden in the Google Keyword Tool results. Just above the results, there is a drop-down selector "Choose columns to display:" Use this to select the columns that are marked beginning with "Show..." to select specific columns to add to your results table (or use "Show All" to show them all). One that we find particularly useful is the search volume trends.

Search Volume Trends

Search volume trends tell you whether a given search volumen for any particular month is a good indicator of an average month. This may hold true for terms that are more or less searched for all year round, but for seasonal terms, there is often one or more months where the terms is searched for a lot more times than in the average month. If you happen to be using Google's Keyword Popularity Tool during this month, the results you see will be biased towards the current (or last) month.

Seasonal Search Terms

While some search terms, such as "Valentine's Day," or "Wimbledon," are obviously seasonal, there are others that experience search cycles that may not be obvious on the surface. To see how indicative the Keyword Tool's monthly search results are of an average month out of the year, make sure to turn on the search volume trends column and examine the search volume trends for each month of the year, as illustrated here:

As you can see, there is a spike during the months of June and July - when Wimbledon typically takes place, for searches related to the keyword "wimbledon." If you mouse over one of the columns in the "search volume trends" graph, the name of the month will pop up. Typically, the first column is the month following the one listed under "local search volume." In this case, the first column is February. Notice how "wimbledon final" is searched for primarily in July. This makes sense - since although in some years Wimbledon may begin in June, the final always takes place in July.

You can also show the column highest volume occurred in to get the name of the one month that had the most searches for your keyphrase. If we do this with the our Wimbledon example, most of the search terms will spike during the month of July, as expected.

We'll deal with some of the columns dealing with "ad" (advertising) statistics in an upcoming article targeting Google's Adwords program, among others.

Google's Keyword Tool - KEI

While it's fun to plug in keywords into Google's Keyword Popularity Tool to see how many searches are made for a given keyphrase, this information on its own doesn't really help you generate much website traffic. What you need to do, besides jumping in and writing pages about the keyphrases which are searched for most, is to find out what your competition is. Otherwise, you might be writing dozens of articles and not getting much traffic. As a rule of thumb, the more general or generic the keyphrase you're targeting is, the more competition it will have. To really find out, however, we take a look at calculating the  KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) for your Google Keyword Tool keyphrases, in our article on the Keyword Effectiveness Index.