In the past week, I’ve noticed as I do research for a client’s keyword strategy, there is a comment at the top of the Google Adwords tool alerting me “In the next month, Google Adwords tool will be replaced by Keyword Planner.” What?!?!

I swear by the Google Adwords tool to conduct my research. As I did a little investigating, this is what I found. According to SearchEngineLand, the Keyword Planner was announced by Google on May 20 and within 60 days of that the Google Adwords tool will be no more.

It’s obvious that this will change the keyword research process a bit but I am not too concerned. I understand Google is trying to only provide tools to those who will utilize them correctly and eventually spend on those keywords – I was surprised the Google Adwords tool was free and accessible for so long! Now, only those users signed into Adwords will be able to use the Keyword Planner tool. It appears WordStream is excited for the change as they discuss the new Keyword Planner incorporating both the Google Keyword Tool and Adwords Traffic Estimator. This should be interesting for local SEO! To read more about the difference and update go to Google’s Support site here.

More to come on this in the next few weeks.