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Jul
20
2010

Google Basic Keyword Research Tools for Your Site

By | Analytics, News & Notes, SEO

3 Comments

Keywords. SEO. Adwords. Content strategy. If you ask a business owner about concerns they have with their website, keywords and SEO are almost always on the list (unfortunately often taking a backseat to usability and proper marketing – but that’s a topic for another post).  Here are some free, good tools, from Google for doing basic keyword research:

Google Analytics – Keyword Report

Located under Traffic Sources in the menu on the left, this report lists the keywords used to get to your site by the number of visits, but also tells you the average amount of pages viewed per visit, the average time on the site, the % of new visits and the bounce rate.  You can also sort the list by any of these variables (for example, taking a look at the keywords that lead to the longest average time on site can be very insightful).

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools give you a look at the keywords the googlebot attributes to your site (with their significance), as well as when your site shows up for search queries (and information about how often it was clicked and for what keywords).

Sorting the queries by clicks and CTR can give you nice insight to which keywords actually lead people to your site.  Seeing all the keywords for which Google shows your site on search results may lead to some unexplored topic areas.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

AdWords has some nice tools for optimizing ad campaigns, but they can also be useful for understanding what keywords Google finds for your site along with their search volume (global and local) and competition.  Using this tool can help you find niches with less competition — both for ads, but also for content creation.

Other Keyword Tools

There are definitely other keyword tools available, some of which we’ve covered here, here and here.

What tools do you use for keyword research?

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  • http://www.optimise-firstfound.co.uk Andy @ FirstFound

    Thanks for doing this rundown. I'm still very sceptical about just how useful Webmaster Tools is though.

  • http://sazbean.com sazbean

    I use Webmaster Tools to see what keywords Google associates with your websites to see if there are opportunities for niche traffic. You can gain some interesting insight by looking for keywords where you have a good average position (lower is better) but not many clicks — as well as the opposite, lots of clicks but lower average position. I also use it to check keywords over time that we’ve decided to focus on — it gives you some nice insight into what Google is doing behind the scenes.

  • http://sazbean.com sazbean

    I use Webmaster Tools to see what keywords Google associates with your websites to see if there are opportunities for niche traffic. You can gain some interesting insight by looking for keywords where you have a good average position (lower is better) but not many clicks — as well as the opposite, lots of clicks but lower average position. I also use it to check keywords over time that we've decided to focus on — it gives you some nice insight into what Google is doing behind the scenes.