Google Keyword Tool Changes

Have you noticed the new interface to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool? The new version came out of beta testing just a few days ago at the end of August, and I am surprised people haven’t been whinging about it vehemently!

I “noticed” the change when I tried last night to do some keyword research for a new project I had in mind… when all the browsers on my older Mac wouldn’t work – Opera and Safari both wouldn’t load it… and with Firefox I couldn’t get past the security screen…
Hint: if it’s not too late for Father’s Day here in Oz… a new Mac would be nice

So after extracting my Windows 7 laptop from my son, I went to see what was going on.

Easy enough to use it seems… just add your keyword – one per line – and away you go. In this case, I was interested in the keywords that were related to a broad match on wordpress training.

Well… the results were less than spectacular!

It suggested that I might get “better” keyword ideas if I logged into my Adwords account (which I didn’t have, so I set one up, which you can do without divulging any credit card details).

Were the results any better? Nope! For this particular search I was flooded with “ideas” on joomla, mambo, drupal, microsoft, 2000, 2003, microsoft word, etc etc etc.

Now you CAN remove such terms by typing a -keyword option in the search box, OR delete them by deselecting them from the list at the left… but that is such a pain when there are a whole heap of unrelated terms you want to delete!

And when I did that… the “final” list of keyword ideas were certainly not what I expected. It just “felt” like this tool was not producing as good a list as the older tool would have done (however without having access to the older tool, I can’t confirm my feeling).

So I did a Google search to see if I could find out what was going on… and there is very little recent discussion on this.

Apart from only one useful recent review on the new keyword tool, I found a limited number of forum posts, which seemed to be more concerned with the search volume numbers now being shown by the new tool – with many reporting HUGE variations/decreases when compared to reports created last month.

Ahhh… interesting times in Internet land… again! Gotta keep you on your toes, eh?

What are your experiences with the new Google Adwords Keyword Tool? Please share them below.

Thanks
Stephen Spry