Would you be interested in understanding what keywords Google think are the most related to your search query? Would you like the results to be updated all the time? How about getting hold of the information for free?

And in addition what about if I told you that you could get all the info using nothing but a browser and a standard Google search?

Interested? Read on….

Firstly lets take a step back and talk about relevance, as this term a very important part of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the searcher with the most accurate and relevant results that it can. They are aware that if they do not provide this info, it’s probable that searchers will no longer use their search engine completely, and no searchers means no ad revenues which is their main source of income!

For a prime example of a search engine losing market share, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most popular search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) lost the crown to Google because they lost the plot with relevance.

I don’t think there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the non Internet Marketing search engine user). If a better solution arrives, the everyday people will just start using that search engine.

Trust me when I say Google are very conscious of this, and put a heap of resources into making sure that when you use Google, the results returned are very related to your the search term you used.

Google need to keep the average searcher happy so that they return Google again and again.

Shred Internet Marketers have, of course located methods to “game” Google in previous years, so that their own web pages come up in place of what should be the most relevant results, and such tricks are still used in modern times.

Mostly these tricks are located by Google who is getting cleverer at finding these types of hacks.

Google seems to get it right most of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.

Ok so given that Google is currently returning the most relevant results and has the biggest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary goal is info relevance to their searchers, does it not make sense to use Googles search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?

For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic

When I entered that search term into google, I got a list of current pages that Google tell us are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).

But in additional to this information at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)….

Searches RELATED to: increase site traffic (Their words).

Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.

Google actually display to you the keywords that they deem to be the most relevant to your search phrase.

If you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what words are displayed, but no matter what you think I think it’s certainly worth investigating further, isn’t it?

In my testing I found the keywords it came back with seemed to be phrases heavily searched on.

In the case of web traffic, the keyword phrases I got back were

increase web traffic free web traffic buy web traffic google web traffic web traffic report web traffic generator web traffic monitoring measure web traffic

They all seem pretty related to my original search.

And you can drill down by clicking on a phrase to get relevant keywords to that search term. For example I could have selected increase web traffic and received a list of related phrases that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you discount this technique compared to using your favorite keyword tool, I would ask that you consider the following.

1) The information from these searches are directly from Googles Server, so the information has not been corrupted in any way.

Many keyword research tools do not use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine information from multiple sources. Here we have information direct from the source!

2) The information returned from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research information that can be months out of date.

I am not saying that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this method, but I do recommend you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!

In my case, I actually use this method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My 2 favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this method is when searching new niches, or when establishing the viability of getting into a particular niche.

One final thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes there are no related searches are provided for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to overlook that oversight.

And sometimes I have to say the terms returned seem a little weird. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).

Get out there and take a look at the related search function in Google. The keyword phrases that come back might end up being very useful.

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