Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Keyword Tools For Effective Adwords Campaigns

One of the most important elements of an effective Google Adwords campaign is selecting the right combination of keywords and keyphrases. There could be millions of keywords associated with your niche and playing a guessing game for the 'right' keywords can be costly. Google offers its own keyword selector tool to make the process of choosing keywords easier, but there's are a handful of other tools you can use to fine-tune your campaign.

Almost all Adwords masters use a three-step strategy when selecting keywords. First, they will start with obvious keywords and run them through the keyword tool to determine the volume and types of searches performed. Then, they may start researching synonyms to find out similar and related searches being conducted by their target market. Finally, they will identify underperforming keywords and eliminate or tweak them from the campaign.

The three-step method described above cannot be implemented without a reliable keyword tool. Howie Jacobson, author of 'Adwords for Dummies' gives out the four most reliable keyword tools that you can use for your campaigns: Google Keyword Selector Tool, Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and a plain Thesaurus.

The most popular tool is Google's Keyword Selector Tool. It is free and you can access it through your Adwords account. The tool allows you to run your keywords on its system and provide you with synonyms or other relevant keywords in your niche. This tool can also compare keywords based on a wide set of statistical data such as search conducted per month, average searches in a year, average cost per click and many others.

Keyword Discovery is a paid service that allows you to manage several lists of keywords, compare data, and produce reports with ease. This is a more robust keyword analysis tool than the free Google Keyword Selector Tool, and is most appropriate for experienced Adwords users and SEO experts. If you're comfortable with paying for the service, Keyword Discovery can help you create comprehensive lists of keywords to help you target very specific groups in your market.

Word Tracker offers both a paid service and a free tool for analyzing keywords. The free keyword tool provides very basic information ,namely, the number of searchers conducted for your keyterm within the month. It's a quick an easy to cross reference search volume for a particular keyword, but the numbers may not be as accurate as the Google Keyword Selector Tool.

Using keyword tools can be an effective way to 'mine' for long-tail keywords and synonyms in your niche. You'll have an opportunity to compare and analyze dozens, even hundreds of keywords easily and can export the data into an Excel spreadsheet or other document for easy retrieval.

Use free keyword tools in building your keyword list for any niche. That's the most important advice I can give to anyone just starting out on Google Adwords. In this way, you get to see how your niche and the mind of your market work allowing you to create effective ads with high click-through rates.