Reprinted Articles

Google has a keyword research tool of its own. To find it, click on the “Tools” link in the green strip at the top of your screen. Now you have two choices: If you’ve already got a full web site up and you don’t want to start completely from scratch in guessing at all the keywords that are there, click on the “Site-Related Keywords” tab and simply enter the web address for one or several pages on your site. Google will search the site and come up with your keyword list for you.

However, if you want to reach people with keywords that you know aren’t obviously found on your web site, click the “Keyword Variations” tab and enter one of your core keywords. Google doesn’t just give you variations of that keyword. Check the tiny box to the right marked “Use synonyms,” and it also gives you a host of related suggested themes. This is no hack job, either. Google’s results here are just the results you’d expect from a world-class search engine.

Some of the results you will just want to get rid of. The best portion will be helpful to you in your management of your Adwords. Google won’t give you the number of searches for your related keyword terms, but they do offer to display for you the amount of traffic they may generate. You can choose this option by selecting the dropdown on “Show Columns” and choosing “Keyword Popularity”.

The partly shaded bars tell you how much competition there is on each keyword, along with the comparative amount of searches each word receives.

Yet another clever feature is “Global search volume trends,” a month-by-month graphic of the average searches your term gets.

That is sharp and quite useful in your Adwords management. Overture can’t give you the variations that Google gives nor can you the information on your competition from any other free service. It doesn’t even cost another dime.

Wordtracker

Using Overture’s feature to get all of the searched alternatives of the term “learn German”, you would get a list of terms where each one included those two words.

1,371 learn to speak german

916 learn german free

598 learn german online free

383 learn to speak german for free

108 learn to speak german online

100 german language learn online

73 learn swiss german

71 learn german software

69 learn german cd

Don’t you think that there are probably people out there wanting to learn German who won’t use that exact phrasing?

Undeniably there are. Phrases like “study German” and “study in German” come to my mind (and probably someone else’s too.) There is probably somebody just on a whim that will type in “learn Deutsch” or how about “sprechen sie Deutsch”.

How are you going to find those other keyword variations? Look at Wordtracker’s Wide Search.

Let’s say now that you’re bidding on keywords for cell phones. Go to Wordtracker, and you’ll get these suggested variations:

mobile phone

nokia

cellphone

cellular phone

ringtones

wireless

sony

ericsson

samsung

sanyo

motorola

bluetooth

accessories

Let your imagination wander a bit, and you’ll realize that these keywords that Wordtracker gave you could take you into new markets you never would have considered. More than a few people have figured out after looking over keywords and traffic that they’d make more money selling accessories for Nokia phones than being a reseller of the phones themselves. There are countless examples of this kind of surprise discovery. That’s why you do this research in the first place. Keep an open mind!

Wordtracker is not meant to provide cost per click projections or estimates of profit possibilities. It is only meant to draw your attention to the possible avenues you can take your keywords down. It can do this by

reporting to you the variations that have been searched for in the last 60 days, and

advising you of the number of searches each term has had by Dogpile and Metacrawler.

You’ll notice, of course, that other than including plurals along with singulars, this list doesn’t give you any other spelling variations, like “cell” or “cell phone” or “cellular.” You’ll have to do those separately.

Last 5 posts by Elance

• Up-To-Date Tips For Superlative PPC Management - May 31st, 2008

Tags: Internet Marketing