Many people were pleasantly surprised to find that Google has now added monthly search count to their External Keyword Tool. This now replaces the former relative search volume metric, which displayed “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” green bars. This is certainly long overdue considering Google obviously had this information all along. The question I have is why provide it now and why did they withhold displaying it all this time?
Actually, that question is fairly unimportant. As always, Google does whatever they please whenever they want.
Perhaps a better question is how useful is the search count data for both Adwords PPC and SEO work?