Google’s Keyword Tool Now Shows Search Volume

Posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Google’s Adwords system has always had it keyword suggestion tool that would help to suggest related keywords but they’ve gone one better. Now they show search volumes for keywords. And the data does a decent job of going down to local level searches. YAY!!!!!

The tool has 3 versions. The external keyword tool can be used if you don’t have an Adwords account or don’t want to log into your account to do some keyword research. It also makes related keyword suggestions while showing volumes for those terms too. Love it

While inside your Adwords account you can access the ad-group keyword tool that will take into account your ad campaigns location and language settings, max click bids and account performance history. Not entirely sure how that influences results just yet. Will have to play with it for a bit.

There is also a standalone version of the tool accessible withing your Adwords account where your account settings are ignored so you can get raw keyword volumes.

More details on the Keyword Tool’s search volume stats can be read here.

Search volumes are based on the previous months totals. Also shows average monthly volume. Data comes from Google itself and their search partners which would be AOL, Ask and others. So we are talking about the vast majority of the entire search market place here.

I’ve been using paid keyword tools, like Word Tracker, who get their search volume data from a wide variety of smaller meta search directories. This was always used as a proxy to estimate volumes in the big engines, namely Google, and since Yahoo abandoned their Overture tool its now nice to see Google open up their search volume data. Should provide far more accurate results about what real search volumes are for all your favorite search terms.

From the limited use I’ve had with the new tool so far it does seem to have a fair bit of data for local level searches, even for smaller cities. This was one of the big downfalls in using the other paid tools who’s data sets were too small and could deliver only but the largest metropolitan areas for local search volumes (and only in some cases).

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