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SEO Tutorial - Using the Google Keyword Tool for SEO

Question: I've heard I should research my keywords in depth prior to SEO. But how do I know what my customers are searching for? What is the best free SEO keyword tool out there, and how do I use it?
Andrea Bergstrom, Columbus, Ohio
January 11, 2010

Contents:
Keywords are Fundamental
The Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Discovery with the Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Volume vs. Keyword Value

Keywords are Fundamental

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Whatever your business, you already probably have some idea of what your target keywords are...

Most companies, and most people, choose their SEO keywords in an ad hoc manner. They simply sit down and brainstorm their keywords. Hm... A personal injury attorney in San Francisco, for example, might sit down with his assistant and simply start writing down potential keywords...

Let's see. Lawyer, Bay Area, SF Bay Area, Malpractice - that's a big practice area for me. Accidents. Hm. There's Auto and Truck. Something like Medical Malpractice Attorney Bay Area would be good. Accidents? Something like Auto Accidents San Francisco would be good. I want to focus as well on suing HMO's, there's a lot of good money there... So HMO Malpractice, or even Kaiser Malpractice...

Getting SEO fit is all about having a systematic plan - founded in keywords, and that's the strategy I teach in my SEO webinar and courses. And just as many people try to get fit without a plan - just starting to exercise some, and eat less (or better), but the really successful people have a systematic plan - just like that, to get Google fit you need a systematic plan.

The first step is to identify your keywords, and group them into keyword families. If you know anything about search, you'll know what is important is how your customers use those keywords - not how you and your staff use them! But how can you determine how customers search? And how can you determine what are not just popular, high volume searches, but also high value searches? Here's where the Google Keyword Tool comes in.

The Google Keyword Tool

1. It's by Google, the search leader, and based on its search data.
2. It's free.
3. It provides data on search volume - by keyword - so you can see how popular a keyword is.
4. It provides data on average cost-per-click CPC or search value, so you can see how valuable competitors think a keyword is.

There are lots of other ways to identify your target keywords, and organize them into keyword families - all of which I teach in my SEO class - but in this Fitness Tutorial, we are just going to concentrate on this one free, fantastic tool. Let's get started!

First of all, the Google keyword tool is at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - you'll want to copy and paste that into your browser and try it yourself. But first, let me give you a tour, based on our example of a Medical Malpractice Attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area, who is trying to attract potential clients to his website. He is going to want to know both the relative volumes of searches on his target keywords as well as the relative values of those terms to him as a businessperson / attorney.

Keyword Discovery with the Google Keyword Tool

1. Top Left - How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
   • Descriptive words or phrases - we are going to work with this option in this fitness post.
   • Website content - we will work with this in another post.

2. Center - Enter one keyword or phrase per line: - for this example, let's enter "Medical Malpractice"

3. Center / Right - click on Global Monthly Search Volume - this will sort your results by highest volume first (remember, we want the highest volume searches for our SEO efforts!)

4. Choose columns to display - click on this and select Show estimated average CPC this will show you the average advertising bid that competitors are willing to pay for each keyword in the list.

Once you have done that you will get something like this (click to open a big screen shot). I have circled in red the most important areas.

Keyword Volume vs. Keyword Value

• Global monthly search volume. By sorting this in descending order, you can see what are the most popular searches. Now, I don't take this as 100% accurate data, but rather as a heuristic - this is sort of like polling the audience on the TV Show Who wants to be a millionaires. For our example, it tells us that the most popular searches for "Medical Malpractice" are

  medical malpractice - 550,000 searches per month
  medical malpractice attorney - 74,000 searches per month | average CPC: $11.61
  medical malpractice lawyer - 74,000 searches per month | average CPC: $15.68 (attorney); average CPC: $14.22 (lawyer) (Note: Google knows that attorney and lawyer are synonyms)
  medical malpractice insurance - 49,500 searches per month | average CPC: $5.62

What does this mean? How can you use this information? The real crux of the matter is the difference between volume and value. Volume simply refers to which search is more popular - more people search for lawyer than for insurance, for example. Value is what competitors are willing to pay for a click in terms of advertising - in this case, about $14.22 for lawyer vs. $5.62 for insurance. If we are a lawyer, we can even see that the word attorney is perceived as slightly more valuable to our competitors than the word lawyer.

But suppose we were selling medical malpractice insurance. In this case even though there is a lot more volume for the attorney / lawyer searches, we would optimize on the added keyword insurance. Insurance for us is where our value proposition meets search. That's also why the bid for medical malpractice at $11.61 is less than when the word lawyer/attorney is added: the generic search is less valuable than the specific search, because as you can imagine the words medical malpractice cover everything from people looking for attorneys (very valuable searches to attorneys) vs. people researching the medical malpractice crisis in our country (teachers, students, and academics are not valuable in a business sense, as they are not looking to purchase anything.

Bottom line - use this tool to brainstorm your keyword list both about volume and value, as you refine your keywords.

Finally, you can "drill down" a keyword by reentering it. Start with medical malpractice for example, and then go back up and enter some of the more interesting phrases, such as, medical malpractice attorney to "drill down" the list. When you do that, you'll see this come up in the list:

medical malpractice attorney in

That's another clue. That people search for attorneys based on geography. As in medical malpractice attorney in San Francisco. As you get SEO fit, you'll want to then optimize for these geographies (if you were an attorney), by adding the relevant geographic terms to your site design.

In sum, the Google Keyword Tool is a fantastic free tool for keyword discovery because it gives us both volume and value. Getting a good keyword list is the first step towards becoming Google fit, so use this tool to start working out your own master keyword worksheet.

Happy SEO Fitness!