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Peter Labrow is a website professional with over twenty years’ experience in business-to-business marketing.
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Keyword research using the Google wonder wheel
Posted by Peter Labrow on 13 October 2009
Any tool that can help you to research keywords for your website is worth looking at and the Google wonder wheel makes it intuitive and fun.
There’s a hidden feature of Google that can help you to explore keywords options of your website. I say hidden, but it’s not a secret, it’s just not that obvious to find.
Start by doing a normal search in Google. We’ll start with the word ‘Dalek’ (as people who know us will realise, our content management demonstration website is Dalek Links).
That brings up a normal search results page (yes, that’s Dalek Links, third from the top currently).
Google search results for “Dalek”
You’ll notice that just at the top is a little ‘show options’ link. It’s easy to miss, since you’re usually focused on the search results themselves. Click on the link.
Google, showing additional search options
A new pane opens on the left-hand side that allows you to refine and filter your search. Down near the bottom, you’ll see a link for ‘wonder wheel’. Click that.
The Google wonder wheel appears
Now a little graphical Flash application has appeared in the centre of the page. This shows our search word, Dalek, and also shows the most popular words related to that primary keyword. Click on any of the words and the diagram expands to take you in a different direction. For example, clicking on ‘Dalek pictures’ opens up some new search words, related to the original, but now striking off in a different direction.
Choosing one keyword changes the other keywords displayed
Likewise, clicking on ‘Dalek sounds’ provides some keyword options that are related to Dalek audio. While this is presented, we also see (on the right) some of the websites that score highly for ‘Dalek sounds’.
Google wonder wheel exploring ‘Dalek sounds’
It’s very neat. It’s also quick and intuitive to use, and lets you play around with keyword combinations far more quickly than most statistically driven tools. Sure, you’ll want to discard those keywords that aren’t relevant to you, and once you’ve made a list of likely keywords you’ll want to get some more information about them, possibly using Google Trends or Google Analytics – but it’s a good starting point.
A point to make here, though, is to be restrained – there’s no point in adding keywords to your website if you don’t have the content to back it up. As an example, Dalek Links doesn’t contain a lot of audio, so websites such as The Daleks WAV Archive (which includes only Dalek audio) are quite rightly going to fare better in Google for that search term. It’s not worth getting hung up about – you can’t be number one in Google for everything.
And now that you’ve discovered the additional Google options, play around with some of them. For example, it’s great for finding new website content (just click on ‘recent results’ or a specific date range). You can also filter those pages you have visited, and those you haven’t – and also display, as text, searches that are related to yours. There’s also a great timeline view, which lets you drill down on what was popular on specific dates.
The Google timeline for ‘Dalek’
You can see that on the timeline for ‘Dalek’ there are big spikes in 2005, 2007 and 2008 – which roughly correspond to the Daleks being featured in episodes of Doctor Who.
These options, and especially Google’s wonder wheel, are very useful tools to use to explore the keywords options available to you in a rough and ready way.
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