At SMX West today, Microsoft’s Bing revealed some updates to Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s a new organic keyword research tool and an API.

On the keyword research tool, Bing’s Duane Forrester explains, “This tool allows you to perform keyword research on any phrase you enter. It resides within your WMT account and offers the ability to see query volume data on the phrase you enter, and related phrases, across many different countries and languages. You can easily explore query volumes on keywords by simply clicking on any related keyword. All data within the tool is exportable, and we hold a history of up to 6 months for all phrases. This means you can select a date range covering up to the previous six months to see query volume data for the time period you select. Query data shown in the results within this tool are based on organic query data from Bing and is raw data, not rounded in any way. This tool is found when you login, on the Keyword tab.”

“Upon login, you see a simple interface with a few options to help you target country and language. You can also select “strict” to ensure results are restricted to the exact phrase to word you entered,” he continues. “Entering a phrase or keyword and clicking the Search button will bring back organic keyword query data for the phrase entered, as well as for related phrases. Here we have selected one filter for the United States, but left the language open, and strict unchecked to see what the keyword ecosystem looks like around our topic, in the US. Not surprisingly, our example of fly fishing, during these winter months, nets us lower query volumes. The graph clearly shows a run-up on query volume coming into the holiday season, and trending lower afterwards. ”

The API, of course, lets you access the data in other places. The documentation for that is here.

Forrester goes more in depth into the new changes in this blog post.

The features are currently available to all people with webmaster tools accounts.