Howdy SEOmozzers! Hope you are all enjoying the Christmas break. For those of you still looking for SEO goodness to read around the holidays, I've put together this post on tools that Google provides that you can use for SEO tasks.
We all love SEO tools because they can make our lives so much easier. Members of SEOmoz know this better than most with the array of tools that SEOmoz has. However we always want more as there are always some tasks that can be automated or made quick by using a tool instead. Google actually provides tools that can assist with SEO tasks; some of them you may know about, others may be new to you. Either way, I wanted to give you a run down of ways you can use Google to help with SEO tasks.
Just as a quick sidenote, Google actually has an SEO guide (PDF link) which is pretty good as both an introduction and a reminder of the basic principles of SEO and how Google works. It amazes me how many SEOs don't read into the technical side of Google and how everything works behind the scenes. This guide helps to cover some of this.
So what tools does Google give you...
This tool helps you to find people on Twitter who are similar or related to the person you search for. You just enter the profile name of someone and the tool will return a list of people also on Twitter.
Practical Use - Very handy if you are just getting into a new market and want to find out who the key influencers are as well as who is active in that community on Twitter. This can lead to the potential of outreach and building relationships with these people. The tool does seem quite accurate given the results that it returned for a search on Rand's profile:
2. Google Sets
I've been using this for quite a while now and even though it is very simple, it is quite useful. You input a keyword and the tool will return a list of keywords which are similar to the one you started with. Here is an example of what results I was given on a search for "BMW":
Practical Use - I use this a lot when I am just starting a project and need to get a feel for all the different related keywords that could be related to the client. It's almost like a brainstorming tool and can certainly help if you are stuck or have brain freeze!
3. Google Alerts + Google Reader + iGoogle = Win!
So this one is a combination of tools. You can use this combination for a number of purposes, but the idea is that you can get these tools to work together then feed the output into an easy to consume format.
Practical Use - I have two main uses of these tools. The first is like an improvised reputation management dashboard. I do this via the following steps -
- Setup a Google Alert for my keywords, eg "Paddy Moogan" OR "Patrick Moogan"
- Add this Google Alert to Google Reader - you could stop at this point but it can look much better!
- Take the RSS feed from Google Reader and add it to your iGoogle interface
So when I login to iGoogle, I have a small widget which will contain any mentioned of the variations of my name. You can then mark them as read and only see new results in your feed which makes things much more efficient. Fortunately today there are no mentions of me. :P
Not many people think of this as an SEO tool but it can be used in a few different ways. The way it works is very simple, just input your keyword and click on Latest from the left hand menu:
Practical Use - I sometimes use this combined with a site: search to see how a website is being cached by Google. If you enter a very large website with lots of link juice, then you can pretty much see live re-caching of the pages on that website, just like this example using the BBC website:
Another use is to use a similar approach to my previous task of monitoring Google Alerts for mentions of your brand. You could run a search for your brand, then leave the latest results running in a different tab / browser whilst you do other work. Then just come back every so often and see if there are any relevant results to you.
Again, this isn't really thought of as an SEO tool but it should be! I actually blogged about this quite a while ago and gave a few instances where this may be useful. In partiuclar when you have to do some very quick keyword analysis and give an answer to a client. There is some debate as to where these results come from, but to me it seems to be a combination of search volume and on-site factors as well as social mentions. So it's still a valid source to look at when trying to come up with additional keywords - in particular long tail keywords.
Practical Use - Fortunately there are tools out there which make using Google Suggest as a tool a lot easier, one of which is this tool from Rob Millard which makes use of the Google Suggest API.
I don't use this as much as I should really. I don't think the data is 100% perfect but when doing comparisons, it can often come in handy.
Practical Use - Make comparisons between similar search terms to see which one you could be targeting and see which ones have become more popular in recent times. I also use it to try and see what search terms are rising pretty fast. If you are lucky enough to see one that is related to your industry, you can sometimes ride the wave by publishing a news article or piece of content around that term. This works especially well if you are included in Google News too. Here is an example of what I've found at the time of writing:
This one kind of goes without saying! There is a wealth of information inside Webmaster Tools and Google are releasing more features all the time.
Practical Use - I love using Webmaster Tools when doing technical site audits. Google gives you information on crawl errors and what they have found in terms of on-site issues which you can then try and fix to improve your site.
Trends is a little different to Insights which I mentioned above. One of the extra features that Trends gives you is the ability to see the "Also Visited" and "Also Searched For" information. We can see the following results when I searched for www.seomoz.org which seem fairly accurate:
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Practical Use - This is a very useful one for doing research around a market that you don't know too well, for example at the start of an SEO project. It can also give you some ideas for sites to get links from, because these are very relevant sites. You can also use these sites to do backlink checks for finding more links that you may not have previously seen.
9. Wonder Wheel
Another useful tool from Google is the Wonder Wheel which was introduced quite a while ago. It's very good for finding related keywords, almost like Google Sets or Google Suggest which were outlined above.
Practical Use - Where the Wonder Wheel really helps is when it comes to showing clients and non SEO people a way to visualise keywords that are related to each other. It works very quickly and you can easily get into the long tail of search terms. Here is an example if you were working in an industry that sold garden sheds, after just three clicks I've got some long tail keyword ideas and can see what the competition is like for each one by looking at the search results to the right:
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10. Image Swirl
I've cheated with this one a little bit - it hasn't really got any SEO use from what I've seen so far. But it is so cool to use! It shows you images that are very similar to each other and the interface is very slick and smooth. Its almost like the Wonder Wheel but for images:
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A screenshot here can't really do it justice so just go and have a play :)
11. Google Zeitgeist
Thanks to Justin for pointing this one out to me. This is almost like a combination between Trends and Insights but looks so much better! The link above is to a summary of 2010 and the billions of searches on Google during the year. You can click on various world events and see a visual representation of which were most popular and in what parts of the world. Just check this out:
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As I said this one is quite new to me so I'm yet to find an SEO use, but it sure looks great and has tons of data for you to look at.
Well there you have it, eleven tools given to us by Google. Go have a play and let me know in the comments if you have any others or different uses for the tools above.
Enjoy the rest of the festive season and I wish you all the best for 2011!
Good article, but I feel it a good spot to leave an obligatory plug for my article on using Google Alerts as a link building device:
https://www.rosshudgens.com/link-building-with-google-alerts-a-guide/
Thanks for adding the link Ross, its a great article. I love Google Alerts for link building purposes. Being able to jump on new opportunities that are fresh in the mind of webmasters makes it so much easier to secure the link.
Indeed Google has a nice list of tools. I personally like Google Insights very much.
Thank you for the tip to combine Alerts with iGoogle via Google Reader. Do you use https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ therefore?
I've never really used that tool before, thanks for pointing it out! I'll take a look.
Hey Patty,
Excellent list, but not only that explanation of practical use in the SEO environment. I use google insights almost always because I specialize in Local Search Engine Optimization.
I have not heard of the Google wonder wheel until now, and can not wait to try out.
Curious as to how you are using Insights for your Local Search Optimization. It's great for looking at trends in certain times of the year for a particular keywords. Is that all you can extract from it?
Thanks for this bunch of tools to play with Paddy. Perfect timing for over the Christmas break.
The only item you mentioned that isn't hotlinked in the subtitle is #9 the Wonder Wheel. For those of y'all that are as dense as I was, to access it, you have to use the menu on the left within the Google search page.
It should have a dropdown arrow and say "Show search tools"
When you open it up, you'll find "Wonder wheel" in the "Standard View" category.
Yep I actually felt a bit silly myself when I was trying to figure out where to link to! Thanks for pointing out the process for getting to the Wonder Wheel.
One of the best tools I have found to sell clients is the SEO tool by Microsoft and it's funny because alot of people in this business don't know it or just don't use it. Plus it's free! It's the best seller tool in my opinion.
My site is https://upgradepromote.com
Thanks for this, especially the Rob Millard tool. Very useful!
- Evan
Using Follow Finder to find the key influencers of a market is a great way to use that tool. I haven't found a whole lot of value in Twitter/Facebook yet but being able to do this doesn't just help your client in the Social Media world but also in other fronts where knowing the big influencers is important. Thanks!
This is a great post, there are a lot of tools here that I have never even heard of! One of my favorite tools (and one I am kind of surprised was not mentioned in this post) is Google Analytics. I think it is really useful for SEO purposes because you can see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site, and how those visitors are interacting with your site - for instance, if they all leave after one second on your website, maybe you should focus on some different keywords so you're attracting the right visitors! :) Anyways, that's just my two cents... :)
Thanks for this great tools...I was looking for the seo tools for my sites to increase the rankings...
Thanks for the tools, I don't know there so many SEO Tool util now, but I am using a new SEO Tool now, it is Addurl Express, and I found it is good to use and very helpful, anyone interest in it, you can check it out at website-promotion.com
Thanks for this great tools...I was looking for the seo tools for my sites to increase the rankings...
Woah!
Just saw this post was trending on Alexa for the keyword "Google Trends".
Way to go - bro.
Wonder Wheel has been out since 2009 but I just read about it now. It looks interesting and definitely easier to go into than the google webmaster tools since it's just a couple clicks away. I will investigate the rest of the other suggestions to see how it can benefit my seo. Thanks!
Wow! I Google set rocks too. I prefer google set vs. wonder wheel. Google set gives me what I want and more keywords than wonderwheel. Awesome.
This is a kinda very good article. These are all nice tools to used for. Thanks! @goodnewscowboy – thanks for the additional information too.
Here another handy tool to pull out keyword ideas from Google Suggest: Ubersuggest It gives you tons of keywords and support many languages.
Thanks for pointing out that tool, its very similar to Rob's keyword suggest tool above but brings back a larger set of keywords which is always useful.
I have to admit that I'm an absolutely massive fan of Google's Wonder Wheel. It's such a powerful way of giving a client examples of how to build out their ecommerce store with related products, title text for their pages, and how to research article marketing subjects for themselves. And the fact that these suggestions are coming directly from Google makes them even more powerful to the client. (And they love the fact you're helping them understand a little bit more about keyword research - albeit a very small part of the puzzle.)Also a great source of semantically related terms when I'm feeling a bit "thick" after a few too many days of holiday season excess... :)
Completly Agree with you about the visual impact of the wonder wheel; but one client asked me one day if that terms are the ones with the bigger search volume and the answer is no...So when i use yhe wonder wheel i combine it with search volume data
Excellent points guys. I agree that the big benefit of the wonder wheel is the visual impact of explaining how keywords are related to the client. In particular with going from short to long tail. Would be great if the wonder wheel fed into search volume data too, I've seen some paid tools that do this but none free as yet.
Another great post & great ideas to utilize. I just wish I had more time to implement these awesome suggestions. Appreciate it!
The Wonder Wheel is very interesting. Are these results the related searches you see at the bottom of Google's 1st page results?
The results at the bottom of SERPs and the Wonder Wheel do seem to crossover a lot, but I've seen many cases of the Wonder Wheel giving additional results that you don't normally see. Its also the visual aspect of the Wonder Wheel that really makes it a useful tool I think.
Great list, I've not come across a couple of these, thanks.
Great artcle. I knew about most of these but there was acouple of new ones in there. Image Swirl seems very cool. I'm going to assume that one of the ways it it finds the images is through alt text. It might be possible to test keywords for your images alt text. As of now it doesn't seem to support search operators. I'm sure there are other factors at work but it could be a very useful way for image heavy sites with a wide variety of subjects in the pictures to pick out the most relevant alt text. Just a thought hopefully someone will research it in the future.
I think that Image Swirl works from a much more advanced system than ALT text. If you look at the images it shows you, they are normally remarkably similar to each other in terms of colour and content. Often you'll see the same image in different sizes. So I think image swirl looks more at the actual "content" of the image to try and work out what an image is, then displays other images which have similar content.
Nice summary of some great tools. I'll try some of them that I didn't try yet !
Thanks !
Thanks for the tools Paddy. Here is my list of 99 Free (and Low Cost) Tools to Improve Your Website straight from my bookmarks. Pay special attention to this powerful tool: WordStream Keyword Grouper and also this new keyword research tool from seogadget. Happy Holidays :)