Out with the Old and in with the New: Google Keyword Tool becomes Google Keyword Planner

There have been many grumblings in the world of SEO this week as Google replaced the much loved Google Keyword Tool with Google Keyword Planner. 

Google Keyword Tool is (or was) as important for SEO companies as stethoscopes are for doctors.  We used it to analyse an industry’s most valuable keywords – which form the backbone of any SEO project.

So what now? 

Well, we get on with business as normal. 

So here are four things that we like about Google Keyword Planner:

1. You can now target cities and regions.  Previously you could only ‘zoom in’ to see national search volumes (a search volume is how many times a keyword is searched for each month either nationally in the UK or globally worldwide). Now you can ‘zoom in’ to look at searches made within a city. This will help us further fine tune the keywords we target on behalf of clients, especially if they operation regionally.

2. Keyword Planner includes data across all platforms. This includes people making searches from a desktop pc, phones and tablets, rather than just searches made on a computer.

3. Quick access to historical search data. Enabling us to see trends for a search term over the previous twelve months. These trends help give us insights into how people will potentially search for any given keyword in the future.

4. You can now multiply keyword lists. This comes in handy when you have a client offering multiple services across a few different regions, as it allows you to get search data for all of the combinations of up to three lists of keywords.

There are some complaints we could make about the new tool, but that’s always the case with something new because change is uncomfortable for us humans.  

We just figure that we have to get on with it. Google Keyword Tool is gone so we must focus on getting the same deep, granular level, insights into our client’s industries with Google Keyword Planner.