Keyword analysis tools

There are quite a few tools out there to help us analyze keywords. The one that gets the most use is the Google Keyword Tool. Not only does this tool provide a good measure on search volume, but improvements on keyword suggestion has made it a more favorable keyword research tool in the SEO community. And it's free. While you don't need to be an AdWords advertiser to use this tool, if you do have an AdWords account, you'll get access to all the bells and whistles of the Keyword Tool.

You can choose to see data for the entire world or just the countries you select, and you can also choose the language of your keyword results. Another important selection is the devices that people are searching on.

Keyword analysis tools |  Keyword analysis

The kinds of keywords people type into their mobile phones are often different than the ones that they type into desktops or laptops, and you can see the differences by using this selection as you do your research. Last, you can choose to filter your results for things like certain levels of competition or search volumes.

Try a keyword search like "canvas shoe design" and click Search. From this one term, we start to discover that people are also searching for things like designer shoes, cheap shoes, canvas or leather shoes, boat shoes, etc.

While Global Monthly Searches includes the entire world, if you specified a country in your settings, the Local Monthly Searches will only show data for the countries you've selected. You'll also want to make sure that competition is checked, and the Local Search Trends column can give you some interesting insights into seasonality. Right from this tool you can select the keywords that you want to potentially include in your keyword list, and you can download a list of the raw data in CSV format, where you can work with the data offline in a tool like Excel.

Two other great tools from Google are Google Insights for Search and Google Trends, which can be found at google.com/insights/search and www.google.com/trends/. These tools lets you type in different keywords and see all kinds of information about how that keyword is being typed into Google searches overtime.

With trends and insights we can see exactly when demand picked up, and we can see that more people are typing in the singular version than the plural. We can see state by state interest through the heat map, which we can get even more keyword ideas in the Top and Rising Searches section. Putting some of these back into the Keyword Tool can start a whole new iteration of research. Using tools like the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights and Google Trends for Search allows us to discover new keywords and understand just what people are typing into search engines.

This exploration and data collection is the backbone of our keyword research process, and can provide us with wonderful insights and ideas around which keywords we'll focus on as part of our SEO strategy.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330