Official Google Wonder Wheel is Back!

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of building an effective website.

You must know the actual search terms people use so your keyword terms target the right audience. There are many tools available to perform quality keyword research, and each has their own benefits and deficiencies.

As one of the best resources for finding highly relevant keyword terms, many people used the Google Wonder Wheel keyword tool.

Google Wonder Wheel

Unfortunately, the Google Wonder Wheel was taken offline on July 3rd of 2011, leaving many people to look for alternatives.

Wonder Wheel was used by many educators, librarians and marketers to find related keywords visually, using Google’s database as the resource. This means that the displayed terms were relevant in Google’s view. Unlike many other keyword research tools, having access to Google’s database was the most accurate source of keyword relevancy. The visual portrayal of keywords also made it simple to discover search terms interactively.

Is Wonder Wheel Really Back?

The Google Wonder Wheel keyword research tool is back (sort of).

One of the newer additions to Google’s Adwords tools is the Contextual Targeting Tool and it contains a feature that many people have not yet noticed. While many are aware that the Contextual Targeting Tool was touted as a replacement for the Wonder Wheel, many don’t realize that it uses the same engine.

At the Google Agency Summit in New York, Jordan Rost stated that the Contextual Targeting Tool doesn’t use a similar engine as the one used for Wonder Wheel, he said it is the exact same engine.

While it is not as visually intuitive as Wonder Wheel was, it will still provide the same valuable data once you know how to use it. So let’s take a look at how the Contextual Targeting Tool can be used to find related keyword terms based on Google’s own data.

How to Use the Contextual Targeting Tool the Same Way You Used the Google Wonder Wheel

Here we are going to look for related keyword terms for SEO. We know that SEO is a very competitive term, and we want to find closely related keyword terms using Google’s data engine that have less competition.

Log in to Google Adwords and select the Tools and Analysis tab, then select the Contextual Targeting Tool.

Google Contextual Targeting Tool

The Contextual Targeting Tool is designed to assist marketers in finding sets of keywords for their display advertising campaigns.

Here we enter SEO and click Search. The program will then find groups of keywords related to your search query and a list of relevant keyword.

From there, we can dig deeper to find better keywords.

We notice the new ad group name SEO Basics which is a terms we hadn’t thought of, so we will use this as our new anchor term.

We enter SEO Basics into the Contextual Targeting tool, hit Search, and now the ad group name SEO Basics includes the keyword term SEO Techniques, which has a good chance of being a less competitive keyword phrase.

To test our theory, we use the Google Keyword Tool and search for the Exact Match for the term SEO Techniques.

Here we see SEO Techniques has exact match traffic of 5400 Global and 1600 US monthly searches and is listed as having Medium competition.

From here we have other tools and techniques we can use to dig deeper into the potential of this keyword phrase.

As you can see, the Google Contextual Targeting Tool is not as easy to use as the Wonder Wheel, mostly due to the lack of visual assistance and there are a few more clicks involved.

However, the fact that the tool uses the exact same engine as was used for Wonder Wheel makes this just as valuable.

There have been many attempts to create a keyword research tool with all the benefits of Wonder Wheel. Some were good contextually, but not as visually appealing, while most were not worth the effort.

That all changed with the creation of Keyword Map Pro

Keyword Map Pro is, in many ways, a better tool than Google’s Wonder Wheel ever was.

Keyword Map Pro vs Google Wonder Wheel

Unlike Wonder Wheel, Keyword Map Pro can dig an unlimited number of levels deep and you can create broad, strong, and mixed relevance maps, and much more. The best part is Keyword Map Pro takes your keywords and relevancy data directly from Google.

Keyword Map Pro Unlimited Levels

Right now, you can get keyword Map Pro at a huge discount including full training videos and some incredible additional bonuses.

Discover all the benefits here: Keyword Map Pro