And furthermore what about if I told you that you could get all the information using nothing but Firefox (or any other browser) and a regular Google search?



Does that take your fancy? Read on....

Firstly lets take a step back and spend a moment discussing relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the person searching with the most accurate and relevant results that it can. They know that if they are unable to provide this information, it's likely that searchers will no longer use their services altogether, and no users means no Adwords revenues which is their main source of income!

For a classic example of a search engine dropping the ball, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most used search engine, and very quickly lost the crown to Google because they lost the plot with relevance.

I doubt there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the non Internet Marketing search engine person). If a better solution comes along, the average people will just start using that service.

Trust me when I say The Powers To Be At Google are very aware of this, and put enormous thought and manpower into making sure that when you use Google, the results returned are highly related to your the search term you used.

Google need to keep the everyday user happy so that they return Google again and again.

Shred Internet Marketers have, of course located ways to "game" Google in the past, so that their own sites show up instead of what should be the most relevant results, and such techniques are still used in modern times.

Usually these black hat techniques are located by Google who is getting cleverer at locating these types of hacks.

Google seems to get it right most of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.

Ok so given that Google is now returning the most relevant information and has the biggest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary mission is information relevance to their searchers, doesn't it make sense to use Googles search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?

For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic

When I entered that keyword phrase into google, I got a list of current pages that Google tell us are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).

But in additional to this information at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)....

Searches RELATED to: increase site traffic (Their words).

Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.

Google actually display to you the keywords that they believe are the most relevant to your search.

Now if you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what phrases are displayed, but in any event you think I believe it's certainly worth looking at, isn't it?

In my testing I found the keywords it came up with seemed to be keywords heavily searched on.

In the case of web traffic, the keyword phrases returned to me were

increase web traffic

free web traffic

buy web traffic

google web traffic

web traffic report

web traffic generator

web traffic monitoring

measure web traffic

They all seem pretty related to my original search.

And you can drill down by clicking on a keyword to get relevant keywords to that keyword. For example I could have selected increase web traffic and obtained a list of related search terms that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you discount this technique compared to using your favorite keyword research program, I would ask that you consider the following.

1) The information from these searches are directly from Googles Server, so the data has not been corrupted in any way.

Many keyword research tools do not use data from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine data from multiple sources. Here we have information direct from the source!

2) The information that comes back from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research data that can be months out of date.

I am not saying that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this method, but I do recommend you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!

In my case, I actually use this method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My two favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this method is when searching new niches, or when trying to establish the viability of getting into a particular market.

One last thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes there are no related search terms come back for a given keyword, but given that it's free I'm happy to overlook that oversight.

And occasionally I have to say the search terms returned seem a little weird. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).

Get out there and have a look at the related search function in Google. The keyword phrases that come back might end up being very useful.