Google Keyword Popularity Tool

Where to Find Keywords?

There are a number of places you can get started to find out what popular keyword phrases 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), language, and more. The tool defaults to your area. For U.S. based users, this would be "English, United States." 

Narrowing Your Search Criteria

Click on each item (for example, "Devices: Desktops and laptops") to narrow your search by a given criteria.

How to Use The Google Keyword Tool

To take full advantage of the Google Keyword Tool, you need to understand it. On the main page, you start a search by typing your keyword phrase(s) (one or more keywords) into the search box, one per line. You may also focus your searches to specific websites by adding a URL to the "website" field. What does this mean? Your keyword suggestions will be based on the content of the website you enter. This is good for finding keyword phrases to optimize your own website as well as for doing a competitive analysis of your competitors' websites.

If you would like to narrow down your search to only the keywords in your keyword phrase, check the box "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms." Typically, we leave this unchecked to find similar keywords, and then go back and check this box once we find a keyword phrase we're interested in and would like to dig deeper.

Filtering and Customizing Your Search

Clicking on "Advanced Options and Filters" will also help you customize your search further. For example, you can filter out adult content, filter keywords by minimum or maximum search volume, and more.

Next, you'll want to type in a keyword phrase into the keyword box. If you want, you can filter words you don't want included in your results, by adding them under the exclude terms box in the left sidebar. Conversely, you can also add more terms via the include terms box. You can also restrict keyword results by categories, and finally, by match type. The match type is very important, and will be discussed more below.

So, at the time of this writing, what did our keyphrase - google keyword tool, return? Let's see:

Most of these results should be self explanatory. There was approximately 368,000 searches for "google keyword tool" globally (in all countries), and 135,000 in the United States (our chosen "local" destination), each month. The Local Monthly Searches (LMS) should, naturally, always be less than the Global Monthly Searches (GMS). 

Below that you'll see a set of keyword ideas that are related, or similar, to the keywords you entered. The interesting thing about these results is that the numbers appear, despite the difference in word order, all the same. Obviously people aren't typing in the exact same phrase the same number of time three different ways. This is where the match type filter comes into play.

The All Important Match Type Filter

By default, the search volume (GMS and LMS) figures returned are a "broad" figure. This means they include any searches related to that term, even if the keywords aren't exactly the same. Here's a break-down of the three match types:

• Broad match (google keyword tool): The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words (the results above).
• Phrase match ("google keyword tool"): The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase.
• Exact match ([google keyword tool]): The search volume for that keyword idea, exactly as the user typed it in (no more or less words in the phrase).

Here you can see that the numbers change significantly, and that in the United States, 90,500 search for the exact phrase [google keyword tool] each month.

What this basically means is, if a web page on your site is the #1 result for "google keyword tool", your website is hosted in the United States, and is written in English, you should get most of those 90,500 searches. You are likely to attract some of the global traffic as well, so you may get somewhere between 90,500 and 246,000 visitors/ month. 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 and to the right, there is a drop-down selector "Columns." Use this to add search criteria to your results. One that we find particularly useful is the local search trends, as this will give you an indication of the seasonality of a keyword phrase. For example, the keyword "christmas" will be heavily skewed towards the month of December. If you use the tool in that month, your numbers will be much higher than average. Checking the local search trends box will reveal this anomaly. More on search volume trends in the next section.

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.