You seen the new keyword research tool on the front page of Google?
Last week Google seemed to make several changes to their website. Firstly in the UK (I’m not sure where else) they started doing auto-complete/predictive searches when you start to type a query into the search box. This is something that many people have wanted to see for quite a while now, its already included as standard in the Google Toolbar and I believe in the US. I’m surprised that its taken Google so long to do this, especially as its been pretty standard on Yahoo for a while now.
Why am I blogging about this? Well I’ve decided to use this as yet another keyword research tool to refer to.
It seems to auto-complete on the basis of most popular searches. Type in “B” and half the possible searches shown are from the BBC. Type in “F” and Facebook, Flickr and Friends Reunited are given to you as likely searches.
This seems to indicate what Google believes to be the most popular keywords that you are likely to fill in. From experience of a few clients and their main keywords for SEO and Adwords, it is fairly accurate with general keywords too.
Of course it isn’t 100% accurate, but after all – what keyword tool is? You just need to take it for what it is. Its a very quick and easy way of seeing popular keywords, quick and easy isn’t normally a feature of SEO or Adwords so you can see my point.
I’m often put in a position with clients when I am put on the spot and given very short notice to present information to clients and my colleagues on keywords and what “good” keywords are. Even more often I’m asked to produce a report of say ten keywords and where a website ranks for those words (at very short notice!) so now I can quickly go to Google and get a broad overview of what keywords I can quickly run searches on.
I may run a little experiment at some point to see if there is a link between the keywords Google predicts and most popular searches on various keyword tools. If anyone is interested in this, leave a comment and I’ll find some time to check this out.
Paddy Moogan
Paddy is an SEO Consultant working for Distilled in the London office.
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December 28th, 2010 at 1:52 am
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