Exploring Google’s New Search-Based Keyword Tool

If you subscribe to Google’s Adword’s blog you probably saw this recent announcement.  Google has launched a new keyword research tool, simply called the Search-Based Keyword Tool.  At first, I thought this tool was just a revision or upgrade to the keyword tool already included in our Adwords accounts.  But this new tool does a few new things and their worth a mention.

The main screen is pretty easy to understand and if you’re logged into you Adwords account, it will automatically pull all of the account profiles you’re managing into a convenient drop-down menu for the Website field.  Or manually, you can enter a specific page within the site you want to examine for new keywords.

After you enter your website address, a search results page will return that looks like this:

From this search results page, you can see new keywords that are currently not in your campaigns, the monthly volume of searches for each word, the competition, bid amounts and the page within your site from which your keyword was extracted.  Anyone can use this tool, so if you don’t have an Adwords account, you’ll be limited to only 100 keywords, the sky is the limit when logged in.

There are some other cool features I thought might be helpful too.  When we research keywords to add to our client campaigns or to use in SEO campaigns, we use a painstaking process to find how many searches are performed in a month’s time, usually done keyword by keyword.   This tool will help save time in that process by compiling that data in one column, “Monthly Searches.”  Export that into your spreadsheet and you’ve got the data you need to make intelligent decisions in one place.

The bids column lets you take an “at a glance” look at keywords and bidding amounts to also help you decide which keywords should be added to your campaigns.

Now when you click on the little magnifying glass, a new world opens up, something I haven’t seen Google offer before in this way.

You can filter your results geographically (even by specific locations) and by a specific date or time range.  This could be particularly helpful if you want to see how many searches are performed on a keyword in a specific location.  If you need to dial in your keywords to a finite audience, this function of the tool can really help you decide whether bidding on a certain keyword will prove beneficial for your campaign.
You can take this tool one step further and to a specific category search.  Just type in the specific keyword or phrase in the “word or phrase” field at the top of the page.  You’ll get the results you’re looking and you can go one step further and categorize them into deeper levels using the category menu on the left side of the page.

What do you think?  Just another keyword tool or something of real value here?  I’ve started using this tool and so far I’ve found it to be pretty helpful.  It’s given me some new insight into keywords I didn’t have added in my campaigns and I really like how I can geographically filter results for my clients who need leads from a specific area of the country.  Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Keyword Research, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.