If you know anything about the SEO industry, you’ll know that a keyword is the term we enter into the search engine when we’re looking for something. Although it’s called a keyword, the term can include multiple words.

Any credible SEO campaign has to begin with some keyword research. The most exhausting thing about dealing with some clients is when they want to rank first for an obscure term, and I’m trying to tell them that there are approximately 0 searches for said term. In order to prove this to clients, I use something called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The tool is free, and it gives you a good idea of monthly and annual searches for certain terms, as well as the competition for them. Although it only shows the Google Adwords (paid search) competition, it’s usually very similar with regards to organic search.

The keyword tool is really simple to use. All you have to do is enter the search term (or terms, as multiple searches can be performed at once) and wait for the results. You’re able to choose which country the searches are performed that you’re looking for.

There are three columns of results – competition, local monthly searches and global monthly searches. Competition is a green power bar. The fuller the bar, the more competition there is for the search term in Google Adwords. Local monthly searches indicates how many searches there are for the term in the country you’ve selected, and global monthly searches is how many searches there have been worldwide.

You’re now able to download these results (either all or selected) into an Excel spreadsheet.

You can now use these results to analyse which search terms would be more effective for your SEO campaign.