Use the Google Keyword Tool to find niche keywords for SEO campaign management that drive targeted traffic to your blogs, press releases and landing pages
The Google Keyword Tool is now the most accurate way to start with a term like “gardening” and come up with optimized articles, landing pages or press releases with niche keyword phrases like “how to start a flower garden” and “how to start a hydroponic garden”. Both, as we discovered, are likely to get you on page one in Google due to the less competitive nature of those exact terms
How to choose keywords with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Say you are a gardening publication and want to write an article on how to plant a garden. “Holy Crap! Gardening Rocks!” might intrigue people who are already reading your blog, but using a title relevant to people who search for your topic means you’re your article will get found and read more often than just the first day it showed up on your blog with a catchy title.
Instead, you should use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and start with your most basic keyword—then build from it. Let’s do a quick test on the word “gardening”:
Choosing the right keywords is the next step in this process. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool will always give back 150 results of related keywords, including the approximate average search volume (that’s the line you want to look at).
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Sort your list of suggested keywords by clicking on “Approximate Average Search Volume” which should give you a keyword list in order of searches. You can choose to hide “Advertiser Competition” and “Approximate Search Volume for the month” inside the tool, as it can get confusing to have all three visible.
You can pick the keyword phrases that sound niche enough for your article, then Google them with “quotes” around the term.
By doing this, you will find out how many pages on Google are already using that exact keyword phrase. This will tell you what your chances are of getting onto page one using the phrase
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In this case, these were the keywords we chose to compare:
Planting a Garden
8,100 searches in Google (per month)
83,700 pages in GoogleStarting a Garden
4,400 searches in Google (per month)
26,300 pages in Google
These are both pretty broad keyword phrases, but if you wanted to end your search here and you were fairly confident in your status, you would choose “starting a garden” because it has much fewer pages in Google to compete with.
If you wanted to get even more niche, you could then enter “starting a garden” into the Google AdWords Keyword Tool which will give you even more keyword suggestions. In this case, we chose:
How to Start a Garden
3,600 searches in Google (per month)
28,700 pages in GoogleHow to Start a Vegetable Garden
720 searches in Google (per month)
6,530 pages in GoogleHow to Start a Flower Garden
140 searches in Google (per month)
863 pages in GoogleStarting a Small Garden
91 searches in Google (per month)
86 pages in Google
After going through two rounds of searches, we’d have stuck with “starting a garden” for since it has a fairly good ratio of searches to pages on Google. “Starting a small garden” would also be a good target in the long tail based on how few competitors it has, and especially if you are a small site with little search engine exposure already.
Don’t just discard the rest of your results though, because now you’ve started to find niche keyword phrases like “how to start a flower garden” and “how to start a vegetable garden”. There are plenty of others too, like “how to start a hydroponic garden” (210 searches, 250 pages)
With this new list, you can not only name your blog posts effectively, you can now start building a Keyword Universe to use on press releases, landing pages, free product, or anything you want to be found on the web..
Hi Goran,
Try displaying the trend data to see if the search volume is being reported as highly seasonal…
I’ve also seen this happen when your browser simply needs to have its cache cleared.
– Amanda
You seem to be an expert on the Google Keyword Tool. I was wondering if you could explain something to me.
I often search and there are 1000’s of results displayed in the Approx Avg Search Volume column yet the data from the previous month is “Insufficient Data”.
This does not make logical senses to me as how can there be no search volume (Insufficient data) during previous months if there are 1000’s on an average month.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.