Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Making the AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool Work for You

By Justin Harrison

Logging into Google AdWords, you will quickly find a large number of very useful tools at your disposal. These tools will make it possible to proof your ads for errors, choose their placement, optimize your website, and generate a huge number of reports so you can how your ads are performing against other sites, in their demographics, and much more. But probably the most powerful tool you will find the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, which uses ad data to generate a list of related keywords along with their recent search data and their cost.

Your first step is to come up with your own list of some basic keywords. This list of no more than 10 to 15 words will provide the AdWords keyword suggestion tool the data it needs to generate new search terms and phrases for you. You can, of course, find these keywords directly on your web pages, but Google can do that for you automatically. Sometimes the best way to start is to brainstorm you own list of terms you think your most profitable visitors would search for if they wanted the content your website provides.

Your next step is to input your list into the keyword suggestion tool. Enter your keywords one at a time. You could input multiple keywords all at once, but if you do, there's a high probability the suggestion tool will return a list of hundreds of keywords that don't really relate to your Adwords campaign. It is far more efficient to limit yourself to only one keyword at a time, letting the the keyword suggestion tool generate related terms that you may be able to use.

Whenever you enter a word or phrase into the keyword suggestion tool, it will come back with other keywords or phrases that match websites with similar content. It will also find keywords and phrases from the Adwords campaigns of other site owners who bid on the some of the same words you chose. The suggestion tool estimates traffic per month, tells you how much competition there is for the word or term, and gives you current prices for placement at various levels of the page.

Moreover, the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool provides you with several dozen more options to get even more useful information about your keywords. The tool allows you to generate monthly traffic charts. These tools tell you how the average monthly popularity of your keywords rises and falls throughout the year. Adwords will generate an estimate of the position of your ad on the page at various bid prices, and you can even retrieve an estimate of the number of clicks you can buy for your budget dollars.

It almost goes without saying that each of these bits of information is important in choosing your keywords, but it is still up to you to select words that you know match your service or your product as it is described on your pages. Don't go for a high volume, low competition search phrase just because it is cheap. Don't choose any word that does not you sell your site. Never throw your money away. But if you wade through your research and stay creative, you be sure that every keyword you choose for your Adwords campaign will drive traffic to your site.

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