Yesterday Google announced new search options which can be found in at the top left of your Google results by clicking the “more options” link.  Being someone who’s in the SEO industry I have to take a close look at any changes Google makes and see how this may effect search patterns and effect my clients websites.

The feature that really caught my eye was the Wonder Wheel feature. At first glance I thought “wow this could be a really good keyword research tool” but I had to first understand how it works. Of course Google won’t just tell us so I did a little of my own research.

Test 1: I did a google search for “Consumer Credit Counseling” a highly competitive term. I found that all of the keywords in the wonder wheel where also keywords found at the bottom of the page under Searches related to: Consumer Credit Counseling:

Related searches at bottom of search result page.

Same keyword phrases found in wonder wheel.

That seemed simple enough. The keywords found in the wonder wheel are the keywords found in the related searches. But was it really that simple?

Test 2: This time I did a search for “Pittsburgh SEO” a less competitive term.

What was found in the wonder wheel for "pittsburgh seo"

But where these the same as the keyword phrases found under related searches?

Related searches don't match the wonder wheel keywords.

So why is this happening?

My Theory: Google looks for keywords that have high search volumes and on found on the pages that rank for the term (in this case “Pittsburgh SEO”).

So being the person I am I had to test this theory. I looked at the pages found in the top 10 results and found that the keywords that where in the wonder wheel where either in the one of the title’s of the top 10 results or found on the body of two or more of the site’s found in the top ten results.

So it looks like it first checks to see if the search volumes of the related terms meet their minimum if not it then looks for more general terms related to the top pages found for that search.