If you're disappointed because the Google Keyword Tool was removed from your arsenals of keyword research tools, don't worry, because the new keyword planner has some features that I know you will love.

Here are the five reasons why I'm loving the new keyword planner

1. You can use it to spy and swipe your competitor's keywords
2. You can find local keywords a lot faster (there's a bonus in this post)
3. This is a wonderful tool for people looking for niche markets and other topics to blog about
4. Create adwords campaigns easily
5. Use it as a guide to create a silo structure for your site (this is huge for relevance)

Now, let me go into the details:

Reason #1: Use Keyword Planner to spy and swipe your competitor's keywords

For this post, I'm going to use my internet marketing blog as an example. If you are doing this for your own website, list the top five competitors websites in your niche or industry. Just do a Google search for your keywords and get the top 3-5 sites.

Go to the new Google Keyword Planner (you need to sign in to your Google account) and enter your competitor's URL to the "your landing page" input box (see image below)

You'll then get results like these...

These are the keywords that are relevant for my site.

It's cool how Google knows which keywords and ad group ideas are relevant for a site. I will then start blogging about these keywords if my site has no content that matches it.

Sometimes, I'll want to be more specific so I'll change the targeting (country) to see what topics are being searched heavily for a particular location (important for doing local seo or local promotion).

Let me try changing the location to Canada.

Notice how the average monthly searches went down and the top keywords changed.

Nice, isn't it.

But sometimes, you want to be more specific and you only want to find long tail keywords of a particular topic.

This is where I love using Include/Exclude

I will enter long tail keyword questions like (why,what, where, what, how, when). You can try other words as well. Google Keyword planner shows me several long tail keywords without using any paid software (see image below).

Long tail keywords are important because they are easier to rank in the search engines and they tend to have higher conversions than fat head keywords.

Now I have several long tail keyword questions that I can add to my list of keywords.

"what is online marketing"

"how to increase blog traffic"

"how to do online marketing"

Reason #2: You can use it to find local keywords a lot faster

If you are doing local SEO, then you'll love this strategy. Add your main topics or keywords in the List 1 column, then add geographic locations (cities or states) in the List 2 column.

Change the Targeting methods to your preferred location (I'm using United States) for this test. And click get estimates.

At first, there will be no data in your ad group ideas or keyword ideas.

Here's what you need to do first. You need to Enter a bid and Enter a Daily Budget in the input boxes.

Just enter any bid and your daily budget. If you are going to use these keyword research for your PPC campaigns, then you can enter the bid and budget that you are willing to spend per day.

*You can also edit the match types to "exact match" and click on the impressions to sort out keywords with the highest traffic potential.

I've included a text file of US Cities, US States and Canada states that you can use. You can download them here.

Reason #3. A wonderful tool for niche marketers, and people looking for more topics to blog about.

The product category search of Keyword planner is a great way to find "untapped" niches.

Just select a product category here, then click get estimates.

I was able to immediately identify "slip resistant shoes" as a potential niche.

I can then check the SEO competition for this keyword by using the Keyword Difficulty tool. As of this moment, it has a keyword difficulty of 35%, which means it's not that difficult to get to the top spot of the search results - ;)

Reason #4. Create adwords campaigns easily

If you are not going to use pay per click advertising (PPC), you can skip this part and go to number 5.

To create your adwords campaigns with keyword planner, just click on the >> arrows and the ad groups will be added to your "keyword plan"

Click review estimates to get detailed stats on your keyword plan.

Then enter your bid and budget once again. You can change the match types as well (broad, phrase, exact).

You can try changing the bid amounts and you'll see how it affects your daily estimates. Of course, your actually stats would be different because PPC is affected by a lot of factors like Click Through Rates (CTR), Quality scores (QS), etc.

Then click save to account to export it to your Adwords dashboard. Make sure you are using the same account as your adwords account.

Reason #5. Use it as a guide to create a silo structure for your website.

Perhaps the reason I love using this tool, is because it helps me find topics that are closely related for my niche. This helps me create a silo structure on my site which will help me boost the relevance on my sites.

Let's go back to my example: slip resistant shoes

If I'm going to build a slip resistant shoes niche website, I'm also going to create categories/articles on comfortable slip resistant shoes, black slip resistant shoes, restaurant slip resistant shoes, etc.

This type of structure is beneficial to the users and the search engines. For bigger websites, I use this as a guideline when creating the structure of the site.

Now back at you...

How are you using Google's New Keyword Planner? Did you like this post? Click like, please share, tweet and leave your comments below.

Wishing you great success in your online campaigns. Cheers!