All SEO specialists are mourning the death of Google’s keyword tool, and I am definitely one of them. For those of you unfamiliar to Google’s keyword tool, it was a simple place to check the competition and amount of searches of your selected keywords. With this useful tool, you could build a keyword list that was guaranteed to bring people onto your site page.
However, now that Google stopped providing the Keyword Tool, they have launched Keyword Planner that has some characteristics that I do not like. It’s not a tool for regular SEO specialists or small business owners, it’s a tool for people who buy ads on Google.
Google Adwords is the main tool for people who sell a product or service in either the side panel of Google’s search page, or in the top line before your search results. These are often the ads that readers skip over because they are designed to make you buy something, and often readers don’t want to buy from a site they know nothing about.
Google Adwords is based on a “pay per click” pricing scale. This is where you buy a keyword, and then you pay Google every time someone clicks on your link. However, if your business doesn’t have money in the budget for this, it’s not necessary to boost your Search Engine Ranking. You don’t need Google Adwords to have higher ranked search results, and people will be more likely to click your link without the “ad.”
Now that we have Keyword Planner, there are several differences that make it harder for SEO specialists to use. Also, you must have a Google Adwords account to use it.
- You can only search one keyword at a time. With the Keyword Tool, you could search all your keywords at once, and it saved a lot of time.
- You have a very tiny list of suggested keyword changes. Keyword Tool used to give you hundreds of suggestions.
- There is a whole column about how much the keyword costs which takes up room on the chart. It’s no longer easy to decipher what the competition of the keyword is vs. the amount of searches. You have to “go looking” for it.
It’s completely geared towards big businesses. It’s not for the small business looking to keep up with the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns; it’s all about Google’s need for people to buy their keywords. I think this makes the integrity of Adwords more questionable.
My suggestion is to try and use Keyword Planner in the same ways that you used the Keyword Tool, but I am on the lookout for a better keyword search result engine. Hopefully, I will write an article about it in the coming months. That is, if Google Keyword Planner hasn’t driven me crazy by then.
