How To Use Google’s Keyword Tool Free

How To Use Google’s Keyword Tool Free

Friday 5 February 2016

Google’s keyword tool was created for Adwords users, but it’s also very useful for people who don’t use Adwords. It serves two main purposes for those who want to achieve good rankings and get more visitors to their website through SEO – to provide keyword ideas and to give estimates of monthly search volumes for keywords. As choosing keywords is a critical stage in the SEO process, knowing how to use this tool properly is essential.

Before explaining how to use the tool, it’s first necessary to highlight a few aspects of it that can be misleading and can result in mistakes being made. Firstly, the ‘competition’ column within the tool. The competition rating (high, medium or low) given in that column refers to the level of competition (i.e. the number of people bidding for a keyword) within Adwords. It’s of no use for assessing how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword using SEO.

Secondly, when assessing search volumes, you should view data for only one location, not all locations. This is because it’s highly probable that your site will only rank highly in one version of Google (i.e. .co.uk). How many searches a keyword gets globally is irrelevant as to get that level of traffic you would need to rank highly in every version of Google. It’s only how many searches a keyword gets in the UK that matters to you.

Thirdly, for one reason or another, the search volume figures aren’t 100% accurate. Therefore, you should use them only as a guide and primarily to compare keywords against each other (e.g. A gets searched for 3 times more than B gets searched for) rather than as an exact prediction of how much traffic your website will receive from Google if it ranks highly for a particular keyword.

Step By Step Guide To Using The Google Keyword Tool

1) Sign in to Google Adwords. Click on ‘Tools and Analysis‘ and then ‘Keyword Planner‘. If you don’t have an Adwords account you can set one up quickly and easily for free.

2) Click on ‘Search for keyword and ad group ideas’.

3) Understand the settings and data.