Since the demise of the Overture Search Suggestion Tool into Yahoo!'s new 'Panama' PPC system, the best free keyword research tool has been Google's own tool which is provided as part of a PPC account as well as a free tool available to anyone to use. This tool is important because it reports search activity on Google over the previous month, but the main drawback has been that no volume data has been displayed - just a comparative bar chart for each term to indicate relative popularity.

However, Google's AdWords blog has announced the new change which has appeared this week, whereby Google is now displaying volume data for these terms, at least within a general range, so that more information can be gleaned on the popularity of each term and the likely search volumes that they attract. So although these are approximated figures, it helps to add an extra level of data onto this already useful tool and should benefit all online advertisers as one of the core research tools to use when looking for the best search terms to target, either through PPC or SEO.