Google's Keyword Tool now includes search volume. Howie Jacobson of AdWords For Dummies shows how to stop guessing about your traffic by using the new keyword tool.

Video Transcription

So one of the biggest questions I get and one of the biggest frustrations that people have on the internet is evaluating keywords. So far, there hasn't been a way to figure out exactly how many searches there have been for particular keywords, for particular match types whether it's broad or phrase or exact, whether singular or plural, misspellings, all that stuff. So it is a bunch of tools that give vague estimates, and so I recommend these tools to my customers, to my readers and they invariably come back with questions well, how does this relate to Google? Because the numbers they see on Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery or any of the free versions very wildly from each other and Google never give you actual numbers. So the questions was always which one is true? Which one reflects what Google is actually going to do. Well, the problem has been solved I think, because Google has now released their search volumes. The actual numbers of searches they are getting, and I want to show you that tool right now. So here is Google's keyword tool, you can get it inside your AdWords campaign by clicking on the Tools, Tab and then looking at keyword tool. You can also find it externally if you don't have an AdWords account yet. Well, wait until you get AdWords For Dummies and then you can get an account for free with $25 and clicks. But if you don't, you can go to Google and just type in Google Keyword tool, and it will take you to the external tool. So here it is, and let's take a look at it, let's do it the very, very basic. So descriptive words or phrases, I am going to enter just the word gout. I saw a product on how to prevent to relieve gout. So I am going to do gout, gout diet, gout prevention, and gout cure, and then I am just going to type those in and I am only going to -- I am going to filter here. I don't want to see new keywords. I just want to see data about these keywords. I am curious. So I am going to click, Get keyword ideas, and here they are. So I've got the four keywords, and which ones you think are the most trafficked? Gout obviously, and here on the right, I can add these too in those account if I am logged in. So you can see here the competition index which we still don't quiet know what that means, it's the number of people competing for that keyword in AdWords. Well, we don't have the actual numbers, but that's easy enough to find out. Then, the most recent month's search volume, and the average search volume. Now, here you can change the Match Type. So Broad means the gout is somewhere in the phrase and that's what triggered the search. You can also go to Exact and see this is how many people typed in this keyword exactly or gout diet exactly, and this is the monthly search volume. So you can also do Phrase, put in quotes, and you can look at negative. In this case, negative doesn't relate to anything. Let's go back to Broad, and I will show you something else you can do here. Let's show ideas for new keywords, and I am going to put in the word Chacon, because there is a French phrase Chacon son gout, which I don't care about. So I am going to get rid of any phrases with this, so it doesn't gum up the words, and I am going to get keyword ideas for new keywords related. Now, I am going to just say, I didn't know about gout diet or gout prevention, I just knew about gout. And so I am going to say, Google, tell me, show me what you've got. And that didn't take too long. It seem like a lot of time these days, but 30 years ago taken your million bucks and six months to get that kind of data. So here we go, gout again, gout prevention, gout diet, but information on gout, gout information and it's got the actual search volume. Now, of course you can search, sort by search volume. So here you can see de gout, that's probably what I don't want, gout food symptoms, and it's got the actual search volume. Now, let's just do a quick comparison to some of the other search tools out there. So we have got gout diet with 33,100. I am going to write that down so I remember it, and we are going to do it quick. And just remember, this is per month. So let's do it quick. Here is Wordtracker. Wordtracker is probably most popular keyword tool that would give you search volume before Google. The question always was how do you compare Wordtracker to Google? Well, here is 440, Wordtracker does it daily. So let's take 440⨯30, and it says we are going to do 13200 searches for that keyword, and we see that Google estimates three times that, or Google has actual experience of three time of that. So you can see that Wordtracker is not exactly accurate when it comes to predicting Google, and it never has been, we just didn't know until we spent the money on Google and ran it. Here is a Keyword Discovery and this is annual searches. So they say gout diet is 1500 a year, which would come out to about 125-130 a month. So you can see, they are way off when it comes to predicting Google's traffic. Now, there were those of us who always known this and had come up with multipliers, but I get a lot of readers at AdWords For Dummies and say, what do you mean you multiplied by somewhere between 30 and 1000 to get the Google traffic? Well, now we don't have to do that anymore. Here is Google numbers, you can add them right away, you can see the search volume. There's another tool with Google that allows you to estimate the bid. This is really going to put a lot of keyword tools out of business, because they are always trying to figure out what happens on Google because that's what we care about. Now, Google is showing you exactly what happens on Google. So that's the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Use it well, use it wisely, enjoy the internet my friends.