Keith Vera
Account Manager
Google announced yesterday the release of a new “search-based keyword tool", currently in beta. This new tool is designed to help advertisers find appropriate Google AdWords keywords that are relevant to a particular landing page they want to use, essentially taking the guesswork out of keyword selection. Just plug in your website and a list of terms is returned that will help you better understand what your “potential customers” are actually searching on to find your products or services.
The problem with this new approach, for service based businesses in particular, is that the site or pages the new tool will make keyword suggestions for are (or should be) already optimized for highly relevant terms based on search volume. These terms are found through traditional keyword research like using the keyword tool Google already offers. Just to test, I ran two different service-based sites through the new tool, one currently optimized for SEO, and one that is not. Naturally, the site optimized for SEO had many keyword suggestions that were highly relevant to the site, along with all the important information like monthly search volume, competition level, and suggested bid price. The site that is not currently optimized returned just one extraneous-for-paid-search keyword suggestion.
It appears that the new search-based tool is only significantly valuable if the site that it is analyzing is properly optimized or able to be crawled easily by Google. I can see this new tool being useful to help analyze current landing pages, or to possibly catch some keyword terms that advertisers may have missed during initial keyword development. Let us know your thoughts on Google's new search-based tool.
