Adwords Planner? It’s time to turn to Bing Keyword Tool

It is common to see people ask for the best alternative to Google keyword tool especially since Keyword planner is tailored to help Adwords users more than those who use it for keyword research. Google has decided to tightly integrate Keyword Planner with Adwords and now and re-branded it as “Adwords Planner”.

Now you are required to login to Adwords Planner with your Google Adwords account and a great deal of useful research functionality has been stripped from the tool. While some people may not have Adwords account to access the Adword Planner or can’t afford paid keyword tools such as SEMRush, KeywordSpy etc, I think it’s time we turned to Bing Keyword Tool.

Bing Keyword Tool is a keyword tool by Bing search engine that lets you research for keyword ideas for your content. The Bing Keyword Tool can be found in the Bing Webmaster Tool with up to 6 months of organic historic data available.

Bing Keyword Tool is idea for long tail keyword research because its data is based completely on organic information and not paid data unlike the Google Adwords Planner. Bing Keyword Tool gives you the actual numbers without averaging, global volume that can be drilled down by country, language filter, export to .CSV and your last 25 queries on its history tool.

Bing Keyword Tool

The interface is quite easy and simple to use, showing the Keyword research area and allows you to also choose date range or specific period of time and you can as well choose language.  There is also the “Strict” mode likened to Google’s “Match Type” though with a different functionality.  When you check the Strict Mode option, it will filter the results to show you only query volumes explicit to the keyword or phrase, excluding phrases which may include the original keyword.

For example, if you type in tablets, and leave strict unchecked, the total query volume shown for the phrase tablets shows an aggregate number inclusive of all phrases containing the word tablets. Selecting “Strict” shows you only the query data for tablets alone, exclusive of other phrases which may contain the word tablets.

I agree that while Bing Keyword Tool may not provide you with a lot of information as the Google Keyword Tool it can prove useful in knowing the exact number of times a keyword has been search on Bing and this can give you an insight into the competition for the keyword.

Bing Keyword Tool can prove very useful especially if you optimize for Bing as well. If Google is making it difficult to use their free keyword tool, then I say it’s time we turn to another free keyword tool – Bing Keyword Tool.

Bing Keyword Tool also provides keyword suggestions and the search volume over a specified period of time and also provides the “Trend” of such keyword over the specified period of time. Click here to login to the Bing Keyword Tool with your Microsoft account, enter the keyword query on the space provided, specify a time frame, country or language and use the “Search” to search for the specified keyword. The keyword suggestion is limited to just 100 phrases.