A guide for hotel marketers.
For those of us who write SEO content for a living, Google’s Keyword Tool has been a godsend. It has told us which words we should optimize our content for, and which ones aren’t worth the trouble. Sadly, Google is retiring their Keyword Tool later this year. Instead, they have replaced it with Keyword Planner, which requires an AdWords account to use.
I’ll explain the new planner in a moment, but let me first share some other keyword tools you can use. My favorite in this list is Übersuggest, a free tool which has given me great suggestions. I’ve divided this list into paid and free tools:
Free
- SEOBook Keyword Tool (Requires a free account. Navigate to Tools > Keyword Tool to find the tool).
- Übersuggest
- Bing Keyword Tool (Requires a Bing Webmaster Tools account)
- KGen (This is a Firefox Addon, so it only works in Firefox. The author suggests a donation of $10)
- SEM Rush
- Wordstream Keyword Suggestion Tool (Has a trial option—30 searches a day free).
- KeywordSpy (Has a free trial).
- Keyword Eye (Their free version is limited to 10 searches per day).
Google’s Keyword Planner Tool
In May, Google announced the demise of their Keyword Tool, and then produced a list of differences between it and their new Keyword Planner. In my opinion, the keyword planner robs marketers of some of the important information previously available in the keyword tool. The planner was obviously solely designed to make it easier for marketers to make more money (for themselves and Google) by having better targeted search engine marketing ads. With a complete lack of SEO consideration built into the planner, I have to wonder whether retiring the keyword tool was a direct attempt by Google to make SEO (and thereby search engine manipulation) harder.
Whatever their reason, the planner is a different tool altogether, and though it can be used for SEO, it’s trickier. I’ll let you explore the differences between the two tools on your own. Below, I’ll explain how to use some basic functions to get good data that can help us write better content for our websites.
Assuming you’re starting from scratch and have no keyword ideas, the planner has a search section that can help you create a list, divided into three major fields: Keyword Explorer, Website Explorer, and Category Explorer.
To start, enter your website’s primary targeted keywords into the keyword explorer field. Let’s take “seattle hotel” for example. The planner then spits out a result of “Ad Group Ideas” that you can sort by average monthly searches, competition, and average cost per click.
If you find that Google has organized keywords into ad groups that are more highly targeted for your needs, then click on an ad group to see more options, and to download a spreadsheet of just those keywords.
I like seeing all keyword ideas related to my initial query, so I’ll click on the Keyword Ideas tab.
Here we see a raw list of keyword ideas related to my initial query, which we can sort as we like. Remember, the “sweet spot” is to find keywords with high average monthly searches and low to medium competition. Writing content for these keywords will give you greater success.
Click the downwards arrow button in the top right-hand section of the field to download the entire list of keywords, that you can sift through later.
The website explorer will show you which keywords Google thinks a website should rank for (that is, it shows you the words the website currently gets traffic from.) This is a great way to discover the words your competitors think are important.
Plug your desired URL into the “your landing page” field and click “get ideas”. You’ll then see a list of keywords and ad groups specific to that website, that may be helpful for your own SEO content creation. Be sure to click on the “Keyword ideas” tab and download all of them for future use.
The category explorer shows you keywords that Google thinks are relevant per category. Now, since they don’t have every category possible included with this planner, the category explorer will probably be of little use to you. Still, it may be interesting to see what Google thinks are good groups of keywords for your niche.
To find hospitality, click on the category and navigate to Travel & Tourism > Accommodations. Here you’ll be able to select your property type (hotel, B&B, vacation rentals, etc.). For this exercise I’ll use “Hotel”.
You’ll notice a distinct lack of focus—results will be all over the map. However, if you do happen to find an ad group idea within this category that pertains to your niche, you can drill down into it to see which keywords Google thinks are important.
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