Would you be interested in knowing what keyword phrases Google think are the most relevant to your google search query? Would you like results returned to be up to date all the time? How about being able to access the information anytime you need it?
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And in addition what about if I told you that you could get all the info using nothing but a browser and a standard Google search?
At least a little bit interested? Then continue reading….
Firstly lets start with the basics and spend a moment discussing relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles search engine results.
Google wants to provide the person searching with the most accurate and relevant results that it can. Google know that if they do not provide this information, it’s probable that searchers will stop using their services completely, and no users means no Adwords revenues which is their main source of income!
For a prime example of a search engine losing market share, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most popular search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) lost the crown to Google because they lost the plot with relevance.
I don’t think there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the non Internet Marketing 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 resources into ensuring that when you search for something, the results that come back are highly related to your the search term you used.
They have to keep the average searcher happy so that they return Google all the time.
Web masters have, of course located methods to “game” Google in the past, so that their own web pages show up in place of what should be the most relevant results, and such techniques are still used today.
Mostly these tricks are located 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 returning the most relevant results and has the largest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary goal is info relevance to their searchers, 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 entered that search term into google, I got a 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 site traffic (Their words).
Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.
Google actually display to you the keywords 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 think it’s certainly worth investigating further, isn’t it?
In my testing I found the keywords it came up with seemed to be keywords 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 phrase to get relevant keywords to that search term. 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, I would ask that you consider the following.
1) The information from these searches are directly from Googles data banks, so the information has not been corrupted in any way.
Many keyword research tools don’t use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine data 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 information that can be months out of date.
I am not saying that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this method, but I do recommend 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 method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My 2 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 trying to establish the viability of entering a particular niche.
One last thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes there are no related searches are provided for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to overlook that oversight.
And sometimes I have to mention that the search 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.
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