Why You Should Use Google’s Free Keyword Research Tool for SEO

Google has released a new version of the Adwords external Keyword Tool and you should be using it for all your SEO and search engine optimization projects.

This keyword research tool was primarily designed for use by internet marketers who use Google’s Adwords service for their pay-per-click campaigns to make money from click-throughs on their ads in Google’s search engine results pages.

As the name (external) of the tool implies it is available outside of any Adwords account, which means all of us also have access to it. Google’s external Adwords keyword tool is therefore a FREE service that we can all benefit from. And what a great tool it is too!

Where is It?

You can find this keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal or just Google “keyword tool” and it will be the first in the list of sites returned. This is the default keyword tool for the USA.

However if you want a country specific version for different Adwords regions just use your local country version of Google and do the same search, but restrict the pages returned to you country. For instance in the UK use google.co.uk to search for “keyword tool” in UK pages only and you will find it at the top of the results at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal or you could just change the URL to reflect your local Google version.

What’s New ?

The recent update to Googles external Keyword Tool for Adwords includes an important addition so that now for the first time the tool, when listing keyword results, shows the actual number of times a keyword is searched for.

By displaying Search Volumes for keyword phrases that are actually searched for in their search engines, Google has given us a better estimate of the real scenario of exactly how often a particular keyword phrase or search term is entered by real people using Google for searches.

This is very important news for anyone involved in Keyword Research and SEO on the internet.

Google has the biggest volume of users by far and can generate much more traffic to websites that the other search engines and because of this most search engine optimization is focused on Google SEO.

What’s Changed?

Up until this new releas most internet marketers, webmasters and SEO consultants will have used paid keyword research tools and services such as Keyword Elite, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and more recently Wordze and to do research and analysis on keywords and keyword phrases.

From the get go these tools and services only ever gathered their information from just a small fraction of the actual searches really performed. In comparison Google obviously has direct access to their own search engines and there can pull in data from a massive number of real searches performed every day.

These other keyword research services extrapolating their data to predict search volumes and at best this is only a vague estimate and the numbers returned could never be considered as particularly.

However these traditional keyword tools were the only way to get any keyword data at all and therefore they were used by most internet marketers as there was no better alternative for search volumes. But now there is!

What’s the Benefit?

The Google Adwords external keyword tool returns keyword search volumes that are not calculated by extrapolating smaller values, but by using realistic numbers from real search volume data available to Google from their own search engine information.

Now if you are doing keyword research you can easily get all the keyword search data you need for you search engine optimization work directly from Google and this is so much more accurate than that which has been provided by all the paid keyword research services.

When doing SEO for a site it is important to know which keywords to rank for to get the traffic you need to your site. Well Google has now given you a free keyword tool that is going to help you out. Initial views are that the search volumes provided are not totally accurate, but that the data you get is going to be of much more value than what has been available in the past.

Another important fact to consider here is that a free version of this keyword tool and therefore the data it provides is also available for each country location, so now keyword search volumes are there for you in whichever country your SEO efforts are focused.

Checkout Google’s new external Adwords Keyword Tool now and have a play with it.

Make it your new SEO keyword tool.