Some great news from Google. The Google Adwords keyword tool now provides numerical information showing the estimated number of searches for a particular key word. You can read more about it here.

Before the change the only way of getting this information was to take a guess by looking at a bar within the keyword tool that gave a rough approximation for comparison purposes between different keyword phrases.

Alternatively you could have subscribed to Wordtracker - but Wordtracker gets all ist dat from two sparsely used metacrawlers: Dogpile and Metacrawler. Its results were likely to be less accurate, especially for more esoteric and thinly searched subjects.

I ran one of my sites through the updated Google keyword tool, and for example, for the term ‘graphic design companies’ it returned 9,900 searches for June. Google says that the tool produces an approximate number, but I suspect that this is fairly accurate.

If you go to Wordtracker and use their free keywords tool to enter the same term, the results are markedly different.

Filed under: Analytics, SEO by Martyn Whittaker