Google provide many tools to help business owners and webmasters manage their websites, this includes a set of tools to help manage their pay per click (PPC) Adwords campaigns.
Although these tools are designed to be used with your Adwords accounts many SEO companies use some of them to help with their organic keyword targeting. There isn’t anything wrong with this and in fact we recommend using some of them, after all if Google are providing you with data about keyword relavence you would be mad not to use it!
So why the negative title to this blog post then?
Google Adwords Good for PPC not for SEO
Google’s keyword tools do provide some useful data, like how competitive a keyword is but you must remember that the tool is providing results for paid search not organic search results.
A good example of this is their ‘Keyword Ideas‘ tool, the idea of this tool is to help generate keywords that you may have not thought of. However the results from this tool tend to be focused on commercial keywords, things like ‘buy dog mints‘ or ‘ski apartments to rent‘. If you wish to target non commercial keywords this tool might not help you too much.
Something that the Adwords tools are useful for is to give you an idea how many times a keyword is searched. The figures are far from exact but if you are deciding between several keywords to target this tool can help by letting you know which is searched more. As mentioned above you can’t use the Keyword Ideas section for this but if you enter in the keywords manually you should get the data you are after.
So if you can’t rely on Google’s Adwords tools to help find new keywords, what can you use?
Here are two good FREE ways to get some keyword ideas to target.
Predictive Searches
When using Google, as you type in their search bar Google often ‘guesses’ what you are going to write and lists several common used searches. This is a very handy way of finding new and commonly used multi-word keyword phrases.
Google Predictive Search
Read about how to save time creating content for your site
Related Searches
If you search for your keyword in Google, scroll to the bottom of the screen and you will find a section called ‘Related Searches‘, here you will be able to find more keyword suggestions which have been used or are commonly used and are somehow connected to your entered in keyword.
Google Related To Search Results
So Google’s Adwords does provide some useful data for SEO but you must remember it is for paid search results so could be providing incorrect data for organic searches.