Review of the New Google Keywords Tool for Search Engine Optimization

Google has released its new keyword analysis tool and naturally, we are interested. While the old keywords tool, which is still available, did little more than provide keyword ideas based on the five or ten keywords that you entered, the new Google Adwords keyword tool does much more this.

For starters, there are categories now to help you in your search for the right keywords. In the previous version of the Google keywords tool, we mostly restricted ourselves to the two or three keywords and never bothered to explore some related ones for better targeting. For instance, if you wanted to know relevant long tail or short tail keywords for accounting or financial auditing, you would stop after the results were displayed and rarely bothered about finding out keywords from related finance fields, optimizing for which could get your website additional visitors.

Thankfully, Google has just made our task easier by adding the categories option. So now, in addition to the keywords related to financial accounting you can also search for highly searched keywords from related finance categories like ATM sales and processing. Below this category is the banking category, which is again related to the finance field for which you were trying to obtain high CPC keywords.

Another exciting feature of the new Google keywords tool is it allows you to filter your keywords in myriad ways. So if you want keyword ideas related to cancer treatment services, the keywords tool from Google will display all the keywords in that broad category grouped into relevant subcategories like "after chemotherapy", "bile duct cancer" and so on. The figures in parenthesis indicate the total number of keywords in that subcategory.

The default selection displays all the keywords for the main category. Obviously, you want to dig deeper and find specific keywords without losing in the keywords maze. Just uncheck the "All" box and instead select only those boxes for which you to obtain keyword ideas.

Notice the keyword matching options - phrase, exact, and broad - are still available. Some things just get better with time I guess.

In addition to the advertiser's competition and global monthly keyword searches, the new Google keywords tool also displays the local monthly search trends in a bar graph form, which is again easy to grasp in one look.

Just click on the filter by which you want to sort your keywords and the keywords rearrange in a jiffy. Notice the magnifier symbol next to the keywords? Clicking on this displays the Google Insights trends for that particular keyword. So you know the search volume for that keyword over a period of time. keywords that were highly searched six months back may not be presently, although the average search count may still seem fairly high. Here's where Google Insight can help you to focus on the niche keywords that are highly searched currently.

Clicking on the keyword displays a Google search for that term in a new window so you can understand the context in which the keyword appears. This is what I call contextual targeting and no one does it better than Google.

Not satisfied with the keyword results you are seeing? You can customize your searches from the Views tab. Add or remove keyword filters from the Select columns menu. The new Google keywords tool even lets you rearrange the column options by a simple drag and drop exercise of your mouse.

The new Google keywords tool gives you more cheer by letting you search for keywords that best relate to your website. So instead of just searching for "PC Repair Lexington", I enter the website URL as well to view results that are best targeted for that computer repair website. This helps to separate the chaff from the wheat, and there's a lot of chaff on the net, speaking matter-of-factly.

Of course, you can still save and export the keyword search data as was the case with the previous Google keyword tool. But Google has improved the save features in the new keyword tool. Now you can just save the keywords search data that you need instead of having to sweat through the entire keyword data sheet as in the old keyword suggest tool.

The old keywords tool from Google was good but the new one is simply outstanding! Not only does it provide all the features provided by a paid keyword tool like Wordtracker, but it additionally provides useful search insights that are highly valuable for any website owner, SEO specialist, or a SEO writer like fellow Hubbers out here.

I hope to get more Hub views, finally!