Keyword Research – Google Wonder Wheel

Google has a tool that I discovered recently that helps you find related keywords. You put in the keyword that you want to start with into Google like you’ve searched a millions times before. On the results page, notice the options on the left side of the page. See where it says “Show search tools”? Click on that and it will expand to display a whole list of options.

Wonder wheel is one of those options. When you click on that, it will bring up the Wonder Wheel using your search term. It will display the top related keywords.

These are keywords that Google thinks are closely related to your keyword. It’s based on what people search for and what pages link to. If pages that are optimized for one keyword tend to be linked to pages optimized for another keyword, they must be related.

If you click on one of the related keywords, you get a new wheel of related keywords to THAT keyword. Keep clicking and you keep seeing new related keywords. You can spend hours doing this.

You can apply this information to your own site by targeting your main page to your main keyword. Then you can have other pages that you can optimize for those related keywords.

If your site has multiple pages optimized for related keywords the way that Google thinks they are related, your whole site will be optimized for all of them. There’s a cumulative effect.

According to the search illustrated here, if I had pages dedicated to “walton family”, “walton music”, “luke walton”, “walton emc”, “walton construction”, “bill walton”, walton high school”, and “wilton”, then my site would rank really high when people searched for “walton.com”.

This is hard to explain without actually using the tool, so go play with it. Enjoy and optimize.