The idea of developing ‘keywords’ for your business has really come of age with the growth in popularity of SEO and PPC advertising. But keywords are useful elsewhere too. They help to focus on key business areas and define what it is that customers or clients are really looking for from your business.

Identifying the right keywords is a tricky job, but Google has made it slightly easier with the launch of its Search-based Keyword Tool. As Google states on its own blog:

“…for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website’s content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns.”

So the tool is designed to analyse your website and identify keywords that you should potentially be using. Google is promoting this primarily for PPC, but its not hard to see the SEO benefits too. The tool then gives you the usual ‘monthly search’ and ‘competition’ metrics for any keywords you highlighted.

When combined with the traditional Google Keywords tool, you have quite a powerful (and free) range of keyword searching options.