Adios free Google Keyword Tool – we will miss you

This month, Google has announced it has plans to axe its free external Keyword Tool. A yellow box at the top of the Keyword Tool page warns, “In the coming months, the external Keyword Tool will no longer be available. To get keyword ideas, sign in to your AdWords account and try Keyword Planner.” Essentially, an AdWords account will need to be created before accessing keyword statistics, presumably so that Google will be better able to track people’s research, since it can no longer be done anonymously.

While it is entirely possible to create an AdWords account and not actually create any ads, solely to access keyword insight, it just adds another step and another password to remember! The external Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner don’t work in exactly the same way, but both provide data about keyword searches on Google.

In addition to supplying data for pay-per-click campaigns, keyword statistics are invaluable for optimising existing websites. The change won’t really impact us here at Web-Translations – we will simply log into our account – but it does make the information less accessible. Interesting, as Google’s mission statement reads “Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”<!–:–