Keywords are what drive visitors to your websites. They are what people use on search engines to look for information, products and services. Through effective online writing, people will be able to find your website easily. The goal of SEO writing is to put you on the first page of search results. Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps you reach that goal. For example, if you are a foodie blogger who is selling e-books on pasta recipes, you’d want people to find your website when they search for the phrase “pasta recipes”. Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows you to determine the right keywords you should use for your website. By populating your website with appropriate keywords, your website will rank higher on search engines because of relevance and keyword density.
Keyword density is the amount of keywords used in an article. Most SEO writers follow a 1% to 2% keyword density rule. Anything above that may make your article look spammy. Once search engines detect that your website has an abnormally high keyword density, the bots may stop crawling your site. This may result to lower traffic and in turn, loss of revenue.
In SEO writing, most writers use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find out the right keywords to use for their articles. This tool allows you to search for a good set of keywords and gather information about how often people use that keyword on search engines. By knowing how a specific keyword performs on search engines, you’d be able to determine how much traffic it can drive to your website. In our example, the exact keyword match of “pasta recipe” has a global month search of 110,000 and a local monthly search (United States) of 40,500. The competition for this keyword is low. Analyzing the results on Google AdWords Keyword Tool will help you decide whether or not you’d like to use this keyword on your SEO writing.
When searching for pertinent keywords, it is important to be specific. Search engine spiders/bots are not intuitive. They search for keywords that are exact matches. In SEO writing, using the keyword as it is written is critical. Adding apostrophe S ( ‘s ) on your keyword or using its plural/singular form may drive different search results. To refer to our example, “pasta recipe” has a lower global monthly search than the original keyword “pasta recipes”.
Here are the steps you can follow when using Google AdWords Keyword Tool in SEO writing.
1. Go to http://adwords.google.com
2. Sign in using your Google account. If you do not have a Google account, sign up for one
3. On the Tools and Analysis tab, select the Keyword Tool.
4. On the Match Types (left side of the screen), the default type is “Broad”. Select “Exact” instead. Choosing “Broad” will not give you specific information on the keyword. In our example, the keyword “pasta recipes” have a global monthly search of 1,500,000 on the “Broad setting ”. This means this is the data on all searches for “pasta recipe” and its variations. This includes searches for “cold pasta recipes”, “healthy pasta recipes”, “easy pasta recipes” and more.
5. On the Find keywords box, type the keyword or phrase you’d like to research about.
6. You may leave the Website and Category blank or fill them out if you want to. You can also set the Advanced Options and Filters to target a specific Geographical Location, Language and Devices.
7. Type the Captcha test and hit the search button.
8. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool will display the Global and Monthly searches for the keyword and also the competition. The tool will also display keyword ideas that are closely related to the main keyword. You may use these terms as secondary keyword or for LSI purposes (we will talk about this on our next blog).
Understanding the Results of the Google AdWords Keyword Tool for Effective SEO Writing
Global Monthly Searches
This column shows information about how often the keyword is searched within a year. The information includes searches from made from all countries and languages.Local Monthly Searches
This is the approximate monthly searches for a specific keyword. This is based on a 12-month period.Competition
This shows the results of how competitive the keyword is in the search engine. If a keyword has a high competition rate, it would be more difficult to get to the first page of the search results because a lot of websites are using the same keyword. Choosing a keyword with a low competition rate will give you a better chance of landing on the first page of search results. However, keep in mind that there are keywords with low competition rates that also have very low global and monthly searches. In SEO writing, being able to reach more people is important. Global and monthly searches determine how popular a keyword is among online users. If you choose one that has low search data, it may take a long time for you to increase your traffic because only a few people are searching for your chosen keyword.For effective SEO writing, writers often pick one major keyword and at least 3 to 5 secondary keywords. The main keyword is repeated a certain number of times in the article depending on the keyword density rule you are following. Secondary keywords are used at least once or twice in the article.
Final Words
Remember that content is king. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool makes SEO writing easier for you. However, this is not the only thing that determines how popular your website will be online. You can’t just randomly put in keywords on your articles without making sense and expect people to love your website. People will keep returning to your website if you offer them informative and high quality articles. This will ultimately make you rank higher on search engines.
