How To Do Keyword Research With Google's External Keyword Tool

Google's External Keyword Tool is a great resource that I use a lot when trying to get a feel for a new niche and for good keywords to use in that niche. What I like about Google's tool is it's flexibility. You can type in a less specific keyword and it will return you a whole list of more specific keywords. You can also type in the URL of a website and Google's tool will tell you what keywords it "sees" that website optimized for.

When you get your results you'll see the results in columns labeled "Advertiser Competition", "Search Volume", " and finally "Avg Search Volume."

"Advertiser Competition" is basically a guide to how competitive a given keyword is. The more colored the bar, the more competitive. "Search Volume" is just that, search volume compared with all other terms that Google tracks. Note: Search volume is for a given month. "Average Search Volume" is a 12-month average.

The bars are not comparisons. Google says they are "quantitative measures", but you can only get a gut feel for how many searches are done, or what the competition is.

Unfortunately, there's no good way to get solid numbers about how many times a certain keyword phrase is searched without using a paid tool, like WordTracker. So you have to basically use your head.

You can, however, sort these lists by the three column heads. Just click on "Advertiser Competition" for instance, and your list will be sorted by that. Or you can sort it by search volume.

What should you be looking for here?

That all depends on your goals. If your paying for your traffic through a pay per click (PPC) type program, then you would want to look for keywords that have less advertiser competition. If your doing what I normally do, which is get your traffic through search engine optimization, then you'll want to go for keywords that get a lot of search volume. (A small piece of a big pie is better than a big piece of a small pie!)

One feature I really love about Google's external tool is the "Website Content" feature.

If you want to send traffic to your site with PPC, then it's very important that Google see your site and your landing page as relevant to the ad you write. Otherwise you can see your cost per click go through the roof! A great way to keep this from happening is to run your website through this tool!

Think about it! When Google returns a list of keywords to you that it's found on your site, there's a very good probability that they think those keywords are relevant to the content of the site.

In other words, those keywords are less likely to have their prices jacked up by Google.