Google has recently announced some updates that affect the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but not as much as anticipated. SEO fanatics were excitedly awaiting the recent announcement from Google and the changes that were coming to the Keyword Planner tool. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the changes were not huge for SEO. They centered more around paid search and pretty new graphics.
If you’re using the Keyword Planner regularly to track your website keywords, the first thing you’ll notice is a new graph at the top that tracks popularity of a keyword over the last year. This could be a great addition for people who have seasonal products. For some of us in the consumer world, it’ll be nice too if the holiday products begin rolling out when the trend is high for them rather than midsummer.
Not only are there new graphs but great ways to manipulate them to control the date range you’re viewing and comparing one keyword’s popularity fluctuations against another keyword. For example, you can see keyword suggestions and volume trends for a specific period of time and compare these same figures over two different periods of time, such as a period of time this year as compared with that same period last year.
Another huge difference is that mobile has clearly become a high priority. A few new tools are devoted to determining the keyword rank on mobile devices and then further breaking it down by device. For those who miss the mobile vs. desktop analytics that disappeared with Keyword Planner this is a nice addition, but it’s not as functional or as user-friendly—yet.
In addition to a breakdown by device, a similar looking graph breaks it all down by location. You can tailor it by adding locations and can get it down to a city comparison, so a small company can really reap some valuable information about their local audience and do some targeted marketing.
The walk-away from these changes is that Keyword Planner is even more useful for the website owner or for deep analytics, but may leave an SEO specialist still feeling a bit of nostalgia for the old Google Keyword Tool.
How do you plan to use the new additions to Google’s Keyword Planner to further your SEO efforts? Let us know in the comments section below.
Contact Filament to learn about our SEO services and how we can help you mine the data and make your website work harder.
