Would you be interested in understanding what keywords Google think are the most relevant to your search query? Would you like the results to be updated all the time? How about being able to access the information at no cost?
And furthermore what about if I mentioned that you could get all the information using nothing but Firefox (or any other browser) and a regular Google search?
Does that take your fancy? Good, lets get into the detail….
Firstly lets take a step back and discuss relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles results returned from your searches.
Google wants to give the person searching with extremely accurate and relevant results possible. Google know that if they are unable to provide this info, it’s probable that users will no longer use their search engine completely, and no users means no Adwords revenues which is their main source of income!
For a classic example of a search engine losing market share, spend a second for AltaVista? In its time it was the most used search engine, and very quickly lost the crown to Google because they dropped the ball with relevance.
I doubt there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the average search engine user). If a better solution arrives, the everyday people will just start using that search engine.
Trust me when I say The Powers To Be At Google are very conscious of this, and put enormous thought and manpower into ensuring that when you search for something, the results returned are highly related to your search term.
They have to keep the everyday searcher happy so that they use Google all the time.
Web masters have, of course located methods to “game” Google in the past, so that their own web pages come up instead of what should be the most relevant pages, and such techniques are still used in modern times.
Mostly these techniques are found by Google who is getting cleverer at finding these types of hacks.
Google seems to get it right a lot of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.
Ok so given that Google is now providing the most relevant information and has the biggest user base compared to any other search engine, and that its obvious that their primary mission is information relevance to their users, doesn’t it make sense to go to their search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?
For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic
When I typed in search term into google, I got back list of current pages that Google tell us are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).
But in additional to this information at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)….
Searches RELATED to: increase web traffic (Their words).
Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.
Google actually show you the search terms that they deem to be the most relevant to your search phrase.
If you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what words are displayed, but no matter what you think I believe it’s certainly worth investigating further, isn’t it?
In my testing I found the keywords it came back with seemed to be phrases heavily searched on.
In the case of web traffic, the keyword phrases I got back were
increase web traffic free web traffic buy web traffic google web traffic web traffic report web traffic generator web traffic monitoring measure web traffic
They all seem pretty related to my original search.
And you can drill down by clicking on a search term to get relevant keywords to that keyword. For example I could have selected increase web traffic and received a list of related phrases that relate to that term.
This is getting interesting. Before you discount this technique compared to using your favorite keyword tool, It’s my suggestion consider the following.
1) The information from these searches are directly from Google, so the information has not been corrupted in any way.
Many keyword research tools do not use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine information from many sources. Here we have information direct from the source!
2) The information returned from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research data that can be months out of date.
I am not suggesting that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this technique, but I do suggest you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!
In my case, I actually use this technique in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My two favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).
I find the best use of this technique is when searching new niches, or when establishing the viability of entering a particular niche.
One final thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes no related searches come back for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to not be too worried about that oversight.
And sometimes I have to mention that the terms returned seem a little bizarre. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).
Get out there and take a look at the related search function in Google. The keyword phrases that come back might end up being very useful.
