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Adwords Improvements - The Google Keyword Tool
Google have updated their keyword tool on Google Adwords to help cut down on the time taken generating a list of valuable and relative keywords and improve your ROI.
If you're not aware already, Adwords is a system which generates sponsored adverts which appear, at an arguably fair price, alongside the organic search results. You will have seen them before, those small boxes in the right hand column of your search results, or the yellow box that appears above the rest, similar to featured listings on eBay.
The Google Keyword tool is designed to help you expand your list of keywords, and provide glimpses of just how well things might work out for you, should you follow their suggestions.
So how might this be of use? As a web developer or SEO expert, you'll often receive vague requests, such as "I'd like to appear on page 1 for hydraulic arms in Birmingham". Unfortunately, you may know little-to-nothing about this subject matter. However if we simply enter "Hydraulic arms" into the Keyword Tool, we're suddenly given 71 other suggested terms. If I was to throw the word "Birmingham" into the mix, the number jumps up to 114. Without any knowledge of the subject matter, Google has just helped me generate 114 keywords.
But then the client corrects himself, he should've been clearer. Hydraulic arms could mean a huge range of machinery. The product he sells is cranes that sit on the back of trucks. So we could throw in the word truck - no doubt doubling our results in the process - but how about that "Website" input field on the Keyword Tool page? Clearing out the keyword search box and putting in your client's website brings up an even longer list of highly relevant keywords based on content all across the site, crawled by Google in an instant.
However there's a point at which the usefulness of a large number of results peaks. It's one thing to turn one search term into seventy, but when you suddenly find yourself with 800, the cost of a PPC campaign would quickly be into the tens-of-thousands. Time to narrow things back down again then. Luckily, Google provides all its results not just as a basic list, but instead provides a detailed analysis of each term. You can also generate keywords relating only to certain countries, or filter the keywords according to difficulty and number of monthly searches.
The Keyword Tool is the latest in a long line of powerful and free tools alongside the likes of analytics and map APIs for which Google digs deep into its expansive web of knowledge to provide developers with comprehensive and clearly presented facts, helping them to make the right decision to expand their influence on Search Engines.
