Now, I don't know about you, but I find it's helpful to be able to include the approximate Google search volume of the keywords and phrases I'm targeting, mostly so I can prioritise their usage.

Unfortunately, up until now I've gone through the painstaking process of manually entering them in to the exported CSV of phrases from the Keywords tool, as it doesn't include the search volume data or any other metric.

Copying and pasting from the browser in to Excel didn't work for me, either, no matter how I tried to format the cells etc.

For a while, I sat there thinking "wouldn't it be nice if Google allowed us to choose the data we export from Keywords?". A pipe dream to be realised in the distant future, at best.

But tonight I hit upon an idea. "I wonder if there are any Firefox plugins out there that allow you to copy table data from browsers and paste it cleanly in to a spreadsheet?". Sure enough, after a little bit of digging, I came across Table Tools. I installed it, tried it out on a few HTML tables on pages and it worked a treat. Best of all, as an added bonus, it allows you to sort data on those pages, as if it were already in a spreadsheet!

So, here's what I did...

1. Installed Table Tools.
2. Went to the Keywords tool.
3. Chose the suggested keywords I wanted and added them to my 'selected keywords' on the right-hand side of the page.
4. Downloaded the keywords as a .CSV for Excel, from the bottom of the 'selected keywords' list.
5. Opened the file and copied all of the keyphrases.
6. Went back to the Keywords tool and pasted in my list of keyphrases.
7. Clicked on 'Filter my results', checked the "Don't show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered." box and then clicked "Get keyword ideas".
8. With Ctrl + Q pressed down, left-clicked and dragged a selection from the top left corner of the table (the 'Keywords' cell) across to 'Approximate avg search volume' and down to the very last row of my keywords (of course, you can select to whichever rows and columns you like). Sort your data before copying if you need to.
9. Pasted the clipboard contents in to Excel and voila! Keywords and phrases, sorted in the order I choose, complete with search volumes. One happy bunny this Easter :tup

This might not be earth-shattering to some of you, but it's definitely helped me!