Doing Keyword Research Using Google Tools

Keyword research is vital part of the digital marketing process – it enables a marketer to predict demand for different keywords, and to also gauge how easy or difficult it is going to be to rank for these keywords. With keyword research you can really tap into your target market, and begin to produce content, good and services that your customers really want to find. It’s the equivalent of market research in traditional marketing. It’s about fact finding.

With Google being the gatekeeper to the internet, they really hold all the keys when it comes to keyword research since the keyword data everyone wants is theirs. There was a time when they were very reticent to give out their keyword data to marketers. This way, SEOs were reduced to using such fringe tools such as WordTracker, which used data feeds from other, smaller, much less relevant search engines, such as Dogpile.

Then a few years ago Google released 3 tools that have revolutionised Keyword Research in the SEO world: The Keyword Tool, Insights for Search and Google Suggest. These three have become of vital importance to the average SEO as they use real data from by far the biggest search engine out there – Google.

This tool is pretty self explanatory – you just plug in a keyword that you think you might want to rank for, then the tool spits out a range of related suggestions, plus the number of searches for those suggestions. Alternatively, you can put in a URL and the tool will give you a list of suggestions based on the content on that page. Data also provided in the tool – the level of competition (low, medium or high). This indicates how hard it would be to rank for a given keyword. Tip no.1 – always select “exact match from the left hand side of the tool screen – this will mean you only have the exact number of searches shown for one keyword – not the number of searches from related searches also. Tip no.2 – always use the “local monthly searches