An Apology & Keyword Tool

We’ve all been there, you start doing something when you have time and then – as other things creep up (let’s call them clients and staffing obligations) suddenly anything that isn’t hammering at your door tends to slip through the cracks. This blog has fallen victim to just that and for this – I am sorry. You come here for reliable and up-to-date information from the SEO realm and find a post 2 weeks old. Well that’s about to change.
Not only am I personally recommitting myself to posting more frequently (at least 3 times per week) – you’re going to see a lot more posts coming in from other Beanstalkers (or should I write … Beans talkers). But for today – you’ll have to put up with me.
So for today I’m going to discuss the newish face of Google’s keyword tool which is right now in beta. The data’s the same so what’s different. A lot if you know where to look.
My quick feedback is that I like it. I think it’s a big step forward to the lay-person and is far more intuitive. Here’s what I like:

• I like that the trending data is shown by default. To me it’s a huge help to not just see if a phrase was highly search last month but what it’s volume has been like for the past year. This data is already available in the keyword tool but it’s displayed by default in the new version. Very helpful information. You’d be surprised at how many phrase have a 1 or 2 month spike that augments their importance. Personally – I want phrases that show steady traffic over all months.
• I like the new “Contains” option that allows you to further filter down your results based on what keywords you want in and what you don’t ant included (words like “free” for example).
• The Match Type has moved to the left. I’m neither here nor there about location but thought I’d let you know where it is. 
• If you’re looking for suggestions – they also have a category selection so you can choose similar keywords by the category or filter by category if your keywords would span multiple industries (let’s use a phrase like “windows installation” for example).
• Google Insights link – I also like the link to Google Insights which gives the user more information on a phrase-by-phrase basis. With regional data, trend data, etc.

Now Google added the beta back in September but I’ve only recently really started digging into it as I can already pull all this data from the classic tool but it was when I was chatting with a client who was at the new version that I realized that for the layman – it’s WAY better.
So head over to the tool at https://adwords.google.com/ – at the top left client over to the beta tool and see what’s available. While you’re at it – schedule regular checks to do this every couple months … it’s just a good idea.