"Keyword Research Tools"

By Arun Agrawal

Keyword Research is the most important tool for your Adwords campaign success. While most of the advertisers fight for a few (most relevant) keywords and drive their bids through the roof, savvy Adwords advertisers look for hundreds of other keywords that relate to the product. You can get a very prominent position for these keywords (even 1st position sometimes) for as low as $0.05 to $0.10 per click.

While these ‘other’ keywords have lower search volume individually, they can combine to send hundreds of visitors per day to your sales page.

Don’t forget that your success with these keywords will depend on good relevant ads. Admittedly this requires much more work than putting a single generic ad for 2 - 5 keywords. However you will be amply rewarded for your work as your total spend for the same number of clicks will be much lower, resulting in higher profit per dollar spent. Of course, feel free to target the very popular and highly relevant terms also if your Return On Investment (ROI) figures allow you.

There are several keyword research tools on the market. Here are a few of them -

Keywords Analyzer (Recommended)
This software allows you to locate hundreds of keywords related to your basic term and also reports the number of Google and Overture ads for each term. It then allows to you to dig further and see the titles and the ad text used by these advertisers.

Keyword Equalizer
Marketed by Jeff Alderson, this software identifies the keyword variations from Overture and then calculates the closeness to the main terms and profitability based on an undisclosed formula.

Adword Analyzer
One of the earliest keyword research software. Quite useful and easy to use.

Overture Inventory
This is a resource offered by Overture for identifying the keyword variations of some basic terms. While the search volume reported by Overture is not considered to be authentic by many users, it gives you a good generic idea. I will recommend you to use these volume figures to rank the keywords in order of importance and not as absolute volume indicators.

Be aware that the singular and plural variations of the term are not shown separately. Similarly the misspellings are also combined in the basic term only.

Adwords Sandbox
This is the resource offered by Google Adwords itself and is considered most authentic. While it was available to the general public earlier, now its access has been restricted to Adwords users only (requires Adwords login).

The sandbox does not report the search volume and this is the biggest limiting factor of this tool.

Wordtracker (Recommended)
This is a subscription based website. You can take a free trial. You can also take a one day membership for about $7 for low volume research.

Wordtracker used to report Google search volume long back but currently, it takes its figures from metacrawlers. It reports the singular, plural and mispellings separately.

Searchit! (Recommended)
This is a special FREE service offered by Site Build It people and combines the various web based FREE tools in a single interface. There is some excellent advice on the side, offered as part of your interface.

Happy researching!

Arun