I realized it has been some time since posting on SEOmoz. I just released a new tool, the Google Keyword Tool Annualizer, over on the Netconcepts website and announced it on the Natural Search Blog. But I also wanted to explore and demonstrate it in even more detail, which I feel lends itself very well to the SEOmoz community.

Whether you are a site owner, a SEO dabbler, have your own practice, or work for an SEO firm, chances are pretty good that you've turned to Google's AdWords Keyword Tool to aid in your keyword research. It's quick and easy, and even though the data is limited to just Google, that's probably a major portion of the audience you are targeting...oh, and it's free.

What really puts this tool at or near the top on most people's list is the insight into search demand that includes the most recent month (for "local" demand), a monthly average (for "global" demand), and if you elect to show some additional columns, it reveals the highest demand month and even monthly comparison demonstrated with a bar chart. Of course, it also leaves some holes unfilled and dots unconnected. Many use the most recent month of local demand as their ordering factor on phrases, while others simply use the global number and assume that approximates to their needs, which in many cases may be good enough.

But what if we could further refine the local demand numbers to get an annual view of the demand, beyond trying to compare the monthly bar charts? That's exactly what the Google Keyword Tool Annualizer does. Based on the most recent local month, it extrapolates the annual demand for the past 12 months. Note that this is calculated based on the monthly relations (so you need to include the monthly Search Volume Trends data in your export, which is hidden by default) to the most recent month's demand. In other words, the annual number isn't just multiplying the last month's data by 12.

You can read more about it and see an example via the link above. The best way to understand though is to just download it (it's free) and play with it.

What I want to do here though is provide a bit more detail on an example and also show a comparison against a couple of the most popular keyword research tools, namely Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. People often have their preferences between these two. I've used both and like both. Like all keyword research tools, they have their pros, cons and quirks, as does Google's. The most important thing we advise clients about when using any of these tools is to look at the demand relation between terms, rather than the actual numbers. It's less about what X and Y is, and more about X being 3 times Y. While you can try to use these numbers to approximate actual traffic potential, that's much more advanced and beyond this post.

For this test, I stuck just to Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker's publicly accessible free versions. In some cases, that required multiple searches (plural versus singular, possessives with and without an apostrophe) to match up against the AdWords export which was made from just two searches; "womens shoes" and "womens boots." Their free tools pull from their regular databases, but only return 100 results. So to be fair to them, some of these challenges and the number of results matching up to the Google results would probably be different via the full versions. As for the searches, I simply chose to focus on womens shoes and boots because we work with a lot of online footwear retailers and I knew there would be some interesting seasonality issues that would come into play with this demo. The number of keywords in this demo is only 214 which is a very small list, especially for these types of sites. So some of the examples you'll see would be even more heightened by a much bigger data set.

I've modified the actual spreadsheet tool for this demo to include the Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker data as well as added comparative order columns for demand: Annualized Local (our base), regular Google Local, Google Global, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker demand. This shows you how the order, from greatest search demand to least, would compare across the board for these 214 terms. Note that not all of the terms showed up in the Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker data based on querying the free tools.

On this smaller sample set, the Annualized Local order lines up pretty closely with the Global, though there is a good bit of shifting as we get further away from the head terms. But comparing against the other tools or even the Annualized order against the regular Local order, we start to see a lot more differences.

The graphic below is just a sampling of the first 50 terms, based on the Annualized ordering:

An example that might first catch your eye is for [women's suede boots], which is ranked 14 based on the Annualized order, but falls all the way down to 85 on the regular Local order. What you would see by reviewing the monthly break out columns (not displayed above but available in the demo spreadsheet) is that this term, based on November and December data from last year, will ramp up tremendously over the next 2 months. So much so that its overall importance positions it up within the top 15 for annual searches. In other words, nearly all of the demand for this term comes over this two month period, which you may have missed based just on the Local demand numbers. Fortunately, the Global ordering might have still brought it to your attention at number 5.

It didn't even show up on our Wordtracker list (none of the apostrophe versions did). But even the Keyword Discovery data might have placed this term below our radar at the 56th position.

Another example, seen in the image below, comes at this from the other direction. Based on Google's Global order, [womens shoes size 5], is ranked 14, though comes in at 69 on the regular Local order, and falls way down to 105 based on our Annualized order. Keyword Discovery has it sitting at 59 and it didn't make Wordtracker's list. Some might look at this term and decide not to try to specifically target it due to its longer tail focus or the challenge of trying to specifically target it. But I'm sure there are some who would look at the higher position on the Global ordering and would focus on this term, and possibly forego other terms that might make more sense.

So there are a couple examples. The only real way to take a look at all this is through actually digging through the demo spreadsheet and playing with the Google Keyword Tool Annualizer with some of your own data. I'll be the last person to say that Google's data is perfect or even the best. Keyword research still requires your own eye and judgment be applied. My hope though is that the Google Keyword Tool Annualizer helps bring an additional layer of detail and hopefully accuracy to the analysis you apply to your keyword research.