Google’s Wonder Wheel Is A Great Visual Keyword Research Tool

Making a name for itself as a niche-busting keyword research tool

I have to admit, I was completely unaware of Google’s Wonder Wheel keyword research tool until fairly recently. It made its debut almost a year ago in May 2009 as part of Google’s new Search Options suite – “a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier,” according to the search giant.

With these fairly new Search Options, you can chop your search results up into several different segments – from recency to geographic location. Of course, we’re interested in Google’s Wonder Wheel for the purposes of aiding us in keyword research.

Google’s Wonder Wheel – “A graphical representation of related search terms”

That describes the tool in a nutshell. Basically, it’s a way to find more terms related to your original search term. What’s cool is the manner in which it displays and the interactivity with which you can expand your Wonder Wheel-ing.

With each click, your Wonder Wheel provides more and more search terms that you may have not considered. It’s like feeding nothing but coffee to a Thesaurus and teaching it to create Flash images (I don’t know – that’s the best I could come up with).

Google’s Wonder Wheel search tool as a niche-finder

Most of the buzz about Wonder Wheel is the ability to access phrases that identify niches you might have not otherwise considered. In the example above, “used cars” introduced us to a number of related terms which we can then plug into Google’s Keyword Research Tool for a more thorough look at the numbers.

A few other things to note when using the Wonder Wheel feature:

• The search results update on the right-hand side of the page as you click through different spokes of the Wonder Wheel. So, as you click, your “regular” web search is following you along.
• You can (and will) get lost in the Wonder Wheel. Each spoke you click on becomes the new node and each node has several spokes of its own to follow. Keep track of the new terms you are interested in further researching.
• Since the Wonder Wheel is mainly a graphical representation of the Related Searches tool, you get the same results…kinda. One of the downsides of Google’s Wonder Wheel is that the Related Searches tool gives you more results at once. Of course, you aren’t able to navigate through them like with the Wonder Wheel.
• You might get the following song stuck in your head if you say or type the phrase Wonder Wheel over and over and over –

• If you want to go back to a previous wheel, you can click the back button on your browser and it will go back one click.

Overall, Google’s Wonder Wheel is a neat little supplementary tool to explore those hidden niche phrases

To learn more about how to use Wonder Wheel, you could check out Google’s official video. Or you could watch this video starring some dude who seems waaaay too excited about this whole thing. Also, if you feel so inclined, you could create a drinking game where every time this guy uses the word “niche,” you have to drink a beer.

This review of Google’s Wonder Wheel is part of a series of keyword research tool reviews from Dragon Search. We’ve already looked at the Wordze Keyword Research Tool and the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool.

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