Google AdWords Keyword Tool Update: Adds New Features & Changes UI

If you have used the Google AdWords Keyword Tool lately, chances are you stumbled upon a few newly added features. If you haven’t, then you should check them out.

The biggest change you will notice is when you do a search for a keyword or phrase, next to your results will be a small down pointing triangle, signifying that if you click it, there is more to see.

The arrow reveals 4 new keyword tool options:

Google Search

Google Insights for Search

Exclude Term

Show More Like This

Here is a larger screen capture of what it looks like on a full page:

Google Search

The first option under your keyword is “Google Search.” Selecting this option will, as you could probably guess, cause your browser to open a new tab and perform a Google search for the keyword term you chose. For me this is very handy especially working in any kind of niche field where you may not know what results a particular search will pull up. It is also useful to quickly see if you are already in the top 3 paid search results, or top 10 organic results for that search term. I wonder if a keyword I am bidding on shows up after clicking on this will count as an “impression” or not in AdWords. We’ll see.

Google Insights for Search

The next option is “Google Insights for Search.” This option will open a new tab on your browser with the Insights data for the keyword term or phrase.

Google Insights is a great option to have because you can easily see if the term in question has any kind of seasonal results. It will also give you a quick view of the top searches that are closely (most of the time) related to your search, as well as a list of searches that are rising in popularity.

Exclude Term

Option number 3 in the new drop-down is “Exclude term.” For those not familiar with this feature, let me brief you. If you are doing keyword research, and you are seeing words that just don’t apply to your search, you can add them to the “Exclude terms” list on the left side of the page. That’s what this option does for you, without making you type it in by hand. While this won’t do anything to eliminate large sets of keywords in that list, it will keep that excluded term in there for future keyword research you do, as long as you don’t refresh the page.

Show More Like This

The final option in the drop-down menu is “Show more like this.” This option replaces your current search term, or terms, with the keyword you just selected. So if you were doing a search on more than one word or phrase, and you select this option, your phrases will be replaced with just the one you selected. Very useful for if you find a keyword that you didn’t think of before, and you want to see if there are others like it that you also did not think of.

Changes to Google Keyword Tool Pagination & Page Size UI

Google also changed the Page Size (amount of keywords shown on a page) and Pagination user interface for the Next / Previous page functions. They removed the paginated navigation from the bottom of the pages and placed it at the top. The “Go to Page (##)” feature has also disappeared.

Here is a screen capture from the original version with the “Go to Page” option:

Here is the new version where you can clearly see a much cleaner UI without the “Go to Page” option:

Additional Google Keyword Tool Button: View as Text

Another new option is next to the “Estimate search traffic” button. It’s named “View as text.” This option is grayed out and not clickable until you select 1 or more keywords, but either checking them or clicking the star. Once you’ve selected a keyword, you can now click the “View as text” button. Clicking it will reveal 2 options: Starred, and Selected, with the number corresponding to the number of keywords you selected.

Clicking on one of the options will bring up a light box with a plain text list of the keywords you selected, in case you want to copy them to your clipboard and edit them in your notepad or something.

Additional Google Keyword Tool Button: More Like These

The next button over is the “More like these” button. This works in much the same was as the new “Show more like this” option under each keyword, except with this button you can check multiple keywords, and it’ll replace your list of words or phrases with the newly checked ones.

Now you can see below what the new search looks like after I clicked on “More like these”:

Is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool More Accurate?

Although we do not have any screen captures of recent keyword results to compare the new version to, it appears as though the results might be more accurate in returning keywords related to your original query’s theme. Nothing scientific in this discovery, just considering several recent searches to what we are seeing now.

Go take a look and play around with the new features. I find them very helpful, I hope you do as well!

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