Smart Traffic Review of Google Keywords Tool
In this series of blog posts we will review different SEO resources, looking at how useful the information they provide is and where they could be improved.
Google Adwords is a pivotal tool for SEO and PPC marketing. While its main purpose is to generate revenue for Google through Pay per Click campaigns, it is recognized throughout the industry and by its owner as producing statistics that are highly useful when optimizing your website for search engines.
The majority of Google Adwords is strictly Pay per Click focused, with only ‘Keyword Tools’ being of any real use for SEO, but the information it provides can be invaluable. The way an individual thinks and searches can be vastly differently at times to the majority of uses, even within the same geographical region. In the UK gender can be defined in vastly different ways across social and age groups – boy, girl, man, woman, lady, gentleman. You will usually want to attract the highest search volumes possible so Adwords is useful for checking if your terminology is commonly used.
Once you have established if your keyword actually has any monthly searches you should take a step back and consider these searches for a moment. Are the searches directly related to your website? Is getting to number 1 on Google for the term going to create conversions for your business? Click on the keyword to open up the search in Google and check what the ranking websites are about.
Google Adwords can also help you decide whether there is the possibility of targeting many small volume keywords or one large volume keyword.
At Smart Traffic reviews we like to see how useful a tool is in planning SEO, but sometimes that means looking around the data provided. In CPC we can see the cost of a PPC campaign and use it to find out what keywords our competitors value. In this example the highest search volume does not have the highest CPC or Competition rate. We need to consider several things in order to be able to use this information for SEO.
1. How the CPC values relate to website conversions – ‘balloons’ has an estimated average CPC value of £0.82 while ‘birthday balloons delivered’ has one of £2.53. This could mean that while the term has fewer searches the conversion rate is higher, therefore is more valuable to a business. Someone who searches for ‘balloons’ may not be ready to buy and the website would take more clicks to gain a conversion.
2. The Comparison in costs between a PPC campaign and a SEO campaign – looking at this information you can start to budget and allocate your digital marketing spend. If you were to create a PPC campaign you would usually need a daily budget. Removing ’99 red balloons lyrics’ and ‘balloons games’ for irrelevancy, 500 visitors per day averaged across the shown keywords would cost £665.88 each day with no clear idea of how much profit would be generated by these visits. Adwords inadvertently helps show how cost affective and more permanent SEO can be.
However, there are some limitations to how useful Adwords can be for search engine optimization. The competition column refers to CPC for the keyword compared to all CPC and gives no indications of the website you’ll be competing with. It’s also best to gather data from other sources in conjunction to the keyword data found here. The number and quality of your Google SERP competitors is as important as the search volumes for your keywords.
Google Adwords is used far more in SEO than Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Advertising because of Google’s domination over search. It is just not market share that keeps the two as no real competition. Both ask for billing details before you sign in, while Google allows you to use your existing Google account or create one in seconds with no ties. For SEO this is clearly favorable because most within the industry will not be planning to actually spending any money so do not want the added hassle. Google Adwords has a better design with Microsoft Adcenter appearing and working like a poor copy, and unfortunately Yahoo’s shrinking search share makes Yahoo Advertising almost redundant to most.
Smart Traffic Review
Pros: The Keywords Tool is necessary for anyone creating an SEO plan for their website, Keywords tool should be used every day by SEO professionals, and it is a clear market leader.
Cons: The majority of features on Google Adwords are ppc focused
