Use Google’s Wonder Wheel For New Keyword Ideas

Keywords are arguably the focal point of online marketing or at least the focal point for search engine marketing. There are tons of tools available for keyword research like the Google Keyword Tool, the SEOBook Keyword Tool, and Wordtracker, just to name a few.  All of these tools will give you a fairly exhaustive list of keywords related to a given topic that can be used for your pay per click or search engine optimization efforts. The problem with using these tools in the manner that most people use them is that there is little variation in your keywords, therefore your campaigns may mirror your competitors campaigns in a lot of regards. You need to differentiate yourself in order to get lower click prices.

One simple way to research new keywords that should be effective in your campaigns is to use Google’s Wonder Wheel. Wonder wheel is a tool that Google provides that gives you a deeper dive into search terms and the phrases that searchers use when they do not find the results they are looking for in their fist attempt. Microsoft Mutations is a similar product that has been around a few years, but does not work nearly as well as Wonder Wheel.

I will walk you through an example of how to use Google’s Wonder Wheel to find new keywords associated with the keyword phrase “Grocery Coupons.” From Google.com, after entering your keyword phrase, you must click on the the link labeled “Show Options.”

This will expand the window and create a new column on the left hand side. From there you need to click on “Wonder Wheel” which is a little more than half way down the left hand side of the page.

Once you have clicked on the wonder wheel link, the center column will change to a diagram that gives you several different keyword options that are related to your search term. These results are usually very general, but always closely related. to your term. The magic of this tool is it’s ability to give ideas of subsequent or more relevant searches that are being used that you can now consider for your PPC campaigns.

For this example, let’s focus on “online grocery coupons” as the keyword phrase that we want to drill down deeper with. Once we click on the phrase “online grocery coupons,” it gives us four more keyword phrases that we can consider adding to out campaigns. You can run these terms through the keyword tools mentioned above to see if they have a larger enough search volume to warrant the effort, but these are terms that give you an idea of how you can start to refine your keywords rather than just using “online grocery coupons.” Let’s go deeper into the results, this time let’s drill-down on “Kraft coupons.”

As you can see from these results we start to get into some heavily branded terms that could be used in your campaigns that are terms that searchers are using after they search for “Kraft coupons.” As a competitor to Kraft, these are terms that you could consider to try and grab business away from Kraft. Kraft can also use these terms to block competitors or increase their presence on certain terms so that they have presence on the search engine results pages in multiple places.

Testing the Wonder Wheel for a few minutes will give you plenty of ideas of different phrases that may want to add to your campaigns. Although, some of the terms will have low traffic volumes, the competition will also likely not be as intense as the general terms. You campaigns need a healthy mix of both. Wonder Wheel when used with other keywords tools gives you the keyword ideas to create that healthy mix.

Tagged as: keyword research