Mediaboss Marketing

Duane Forrester, the Bing Webmaster Tools senior program manager, recently unveiled a slew of new tools that can be found within the Bing Webmaster Tools interface. As Derek Edmond put it in his recap of the SES New York SEO Tools of the Trade session, what caught my eye was:

As an SEO, I find myself doing a lot of key phrase research and the tools of the trade seem like they change as fast as the search algorithms themselves. Over the years I've had the chance to get "down and dirty" with more than my fair share but also over that time more and more tools rely on data pulled directly from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.

Now Googles keyword tool is a fine tool and has turned into the default for many an optimizer. I myself use it on a day-to-day basis for brief research (like keywords for a blog post). Its usable, but the numbers always seem off. I'm not sure if it's the rounding, the averages, the paid search data, or the fact that time and time again I see SEOs ignoring the match types, but every time I use it, I just feel a little like Google isnt giving me the data that I'm trying to see.

That's why my ears perked up when I heard about the new Bing Keyword Tool. Through Microsoft Ad Intelligence, MSN has been giving away some actual numbers for years. However that Excel plugin has always been buggy and has worked as often as it hasn't for me so I was excited to see what might come from a web interface.

Out of the box, here are the highlights of what you get from the new Bing Keyword Tool:

Admittedly there are some really cool things here and as it's in "Beta", I'm hopeful that there are improvements still to come. It's very nice to see the actual number of queries a term gets and to sort by these as well.

One thing you should familiarize yourself with as you start to use this tool is the "Strict Mode" checkbox. I like it's placement in the interface as it stands out more than Google's "Match Type" menu but the functionality here is slightly different.

If you select 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 cars, and leave strict unchecked, the total query volume shown for the phrase cars shows an aggregate number inclusive of all phrases containing the word cars.

Read more:
Bing Keyword Research Tool: Highlights & Limitations