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Would you be interested in knowing what keywords Google think are the most relevant to your search query? Would you like this list of results to be kept updated all the time? How about being able to access the information at no cost?

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And furthermore what about if I mentioned that you could retrieve all the information using nothing but your favorite browser and a standard Google search?

At least a little bit interested? Then continue reading….

Firstly lets take a step back and talk about relevance, as this term a very important part of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the searcher with the most accurate and relevant results that it can. They are aware that if they do not provide this info, it’s probable that searchers will no longer use their search engine completely, and no searchers means no ad revenues which is their main source of income!

For a prime example of a search engine losing market share, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most popular search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) lost the crown to Google because they lost the plot with relevance.

I don’t think there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the non Internet Marketing search engine person). If a better alternative comes along, the everyday user will just start using that service.

Trust me when I say Google are very conscious of this, and put a heap of resources into making sure that when you use Google, the results returned are very related to your the search term you used.

They have to keep the average searcher happy so that they return Google all the time.

Web masters have, of course located methods to “game” Google in the past, so that their own web pages show up in place of what should be the most relevant results, and such techniques are still used today.

Usually these black hat techniques are located by Google who is getting smarter at locating these types of hacks.

Google seems to get it right most of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.

Ok so given that Google is now returning the most relevant results and has the largest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary goal is info relevance to their searchers, doesn’t it make sense to go to their search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?

For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic

When I typed in keyword phrase into google, I got a list of current pages that Google tell us are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).

But in additional to these results at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)….

Searches RELATED to: increase site traffic (Their words).

Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.

Google actually display to you the keywords that they deem to be the most relevant to your search phrase.

If you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what phrases are displayed, but no matter what you think I think it’s certainly worth looking at, isn’t it?

In my testing I found the keywords it came back with seemed to be terms heavily searched on.

In the case of web traffic, the search terms I got back were

increase web traffic free web traffic buy web traffic google web traffic web traffic report web traffic generator web traffic monitoring measure web traffic

They all seem pretty related to my original search.

And you can drill down by clicking on a search term to get relevant keywords to that phrase. For example I could have clicked increase web traffic and obtained a list of related search terms that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you discount this technique compared to using your favorite keyword tool, I would ask that you consider the following.

1) The information from these searches are directly from Googles Server, so the data has not been corrupted in any way.

Many keyword research tools do not use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine information from multiple sources. Here we have information direct from the source!

2) The information that comes back from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research information that can be months out of date.

I am not saying that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this method, but I do recommend you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!

In my case, I actually use this method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My 2 favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this method is when searching new niches, or when trying to establish the viability of getting into a particular market.

One final thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes there are no related search terms come back for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to not be too worried about that oversight.

And sometimes I have to mention that the search terms returned seem a little bizarre. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).

Get out there and take a look at the related search function in Google. The search terms returned might end up being very useful.