Google Keywords Data

I'm sure that most of you know that the Google Keyword Tool is part of Google Adwords. It is primarily there so that when you set up your adwords campaigns you can check out which keywords you want to bid on - choosing maybe those that have the least competition and a low cost per click (CPC) so that you end up paying less for your advertising.

But Google keywords are also used by people who may not necessarily have a Google Adwords account and want to find out which keywords they should use for example in their Hubs, websites or other online articles.

Google Keywords gives you the following data:

• Competition - ranked as Low, Medium or High
• Global Monthly Searches
• Local Monthly Searches
• Approximate CPC

The above 4 are the default columns shown although there are more that you can display if you choose (by clicking on 'columns' just above the results on the right).

The keywords competition data shows how much competition there is between advertisers for a particular keyword. In the last couple of weeks an update has been made to the Google keyword tool that means that now you will just see the words low, medium or high rather than the previous more useful tool which showed a graduated green bar.

Personally I found the green bar much more useful because a keyword could be at either end of the spectrum in each category. For instance, in the Low category, a keyword could have virtually no competition (shown by an empty bar) or it could be bordering on medium competition (the scale is in thirds so split into Low being 0- 0.33, Medium being 0.34 to 0.66 and High being 0.67 to 1. So you can see that there can also be a lot of difference between the lowest end of High and the highest end.

However, if you still want the more specific Keyword Competition data, then it is still available. All you need to do is to download the data in csv format and open it in excel and you will see the actual numbers between 0 and 1.

If you are looking for a keyword for your website then you would ideally find keywords with high competition from advertisers so that they are having to pay more for clicks and hence you will earn more money.

You will see above what the Google keyword Competition column used to look like - sorry this is the only screenshot that I had with some data that I am using so I have had to blank it out.

The global monthly searches figure shows the average monthly number of searches for each term that you choose and this figure is an average over the last year. Obviously if you are looking for keywords to use in your articles or on your websites then it is ideal to find keywords that have a high number of searches and low competition.

Local monthly searches shows the average number of monthly searches over the last 12 months from the locations you have chosen. By default, if you have an adwords account and are signed in to it when doing your research, it will show the data from your own location.

However, you can change this if you are looking for data from some other location and you can pick from any number of countries. As I said, the data shown is an average but if you want to break it down to see how this varies by month then just show one of the extra columns which is 'Local Search Trends' and that will give you a little month by month graph so that you can see it there is a variation in the search for this data over the year, or if one month has more searches than another.

Obviously this would be quite useful for some seasonal data.

For some people this is a more useful piece of information than for others and there are two ways of looking at it. When you are looking for keyword data for your own Google Adwords advertisements then obviously you want to look for keywords that have a lower average CPC. This means that when your adverts are shown for your chosen keyword you will likely have to pay less for them.

However, if you are looking for keywords that you are using for your own websites or writing then you will want to look for keywords with a higher cost per click rate as these will likely be the ads that will show in your articles and you will want to earn as much as possible by people clicking on those ads and with a higher cost per click you should earn more money.

Although it is useful to do some keyword research for your articles and websites it does not always work. Sometimes you might find keywords that have high search volumes with low competition but still you cannot rank for that keyword. There are a few reasons for this and I don't know the be all and end all of it but there are plenty of other hubs around with more information.

I started writing this article because I thought it would be useful to know that you could still get the competition data in a more specific format than Low, Medium, High so that was my main aim to let you know that information was still available. However, in doing that I thought I should also touch upon the rest of the functionality of Google Keywords.