Keyword Tools

Keywords are the essence of pay per click search engine advertising. And the art of selecting the best keywords to market your product or service is the essence of a successful internet marketing campaign. Fortunately, keyword selection is every bit as much a science as it is an art, and as such you’ll find ample software packages for purchase that’ll help streamline, automate, and optimize your efforts.

Before perusing the keyword tools reviewed in our website, it may serve you to familiarize yourself with the essential features you’ll be comparing.

Effective keyword selection involves two crucial steps:

Finding those search terms (keywords and keyword phrases) most commonly queried by your target audience.
Finding, of those, the ones that your competition is least aware of

Any keyword tool worth its salt will assist you in both of these areas. The only reason you might even consider a keyword tool that does not offer services in both keyword selection and competition data is if that tool excels far beyond any of the others’ in its limited area of expertise. And ultimately you’ll still need to perform both steps above to truly optimize your campaign, which may only necessitate you then buying two software packages rather than one. Best to stick with one comprehensive tool rather than skip back and forth between two, however compatible, standalone tools – usually.

Keyword Selection

At the very least, a keyword tool should generate for you an automatic list of keyword variations and keyword phrases based on any word or words you enter.

Therefore, if you input ICE, a keyword tool might come up with:
ICING
ICES
ITALIAN ICES
DRY ICE
ICICLES
ICE FISHING
ICE SKATING
ICE SKATES
Etc, etc…

But if this is all you’re getting from your keyword suggestion tool, then you’re missing out, because many keyword tools offer subsequent searches for Similar and Related keywords. These are other keywords and phrases that people searching for your product or service may enter instead of the most obvious (or what you may consider to be the most obvious) search terms.

Continuing with our example of ICE, a similar and related keywords search might come up with:
HOCKEY
NHL
REFRIGERATION
FREEZERS
ANTIFREEZE
WINTER
CRYOGENICS
ANTARCTICA
ALASKA
Etc. etc…

Most keyword tools will also include some amount of research data on the number of searches conducted with each search term over a period of time, possibly organized by specific search engine.

Remember, when you bid on a keyword or phrase for placement in a search engine’s results pages, you are bidding on that EXACT word or phrase. Each variation requires a separate bid. If a query is entered that varies in any way from the exact search term you’ve bid on, you’re out of luck. Your listing won’t come up.

So, do you bid on ANTIFREEZE or ANTI-FREEZE?
Do you bid on NHL or NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE?
Do you bid on ICE or ICES?

A keyword suggestion tool should facilitate you drilling down through search terms and similar and related search terms, compiling a hefty list of marketable possibilities, then help you narrow down your selection tremendously to those choice search terms most popular with your target audience.

But your job is far from done there. On the contrary, now that you’ve compiled the data, it’s time for analysis, and the most relevant analysis you can possibly do at this point in the process is of competitor’s data. This is the information that will help you cull from your hefty list those select search terms that will give you the most bang for your buck.

Competition Data

While knowing the most popular keywords certainly has its value, that value is most definitely limited, because if you can generate a list of these chronically-queried search terms with a click of a button, so can every other company under the sun, and then it becomes a matter of who has the deepest wallet.

Only 10 or so listings make it to page 1 of any given search engine’s results page, and statistics show most web surfers don’t look beyond page 1 to find what they’re seeking. Moreover, most people don’t bother scanning down below the top 3 listings for any given search query. The bid per click in order to get top 3 placement for these most popular of keywords ends up being astronomical.

But fear not, small business-person! There are literally billions of searches conducted each month and while the big gators clamber for placement under the most obvious (and therefore expensive) of Top Keywords, you can go after those unsung surfers who don’t think quite like the average Joes and Janes.

Many keyword tools will tell you exactly which competitors are using any given search term, their exact bid per click, and sometimes even the URL of their landing page. Using this invaluable tool, you can hone your keyword list down to only those words that

generate substantial traffic, but that
little to no other competing sites have bid on.

This gives you top placement at incredible discounts on keywords and keyword phrases already proven to be popular with your target audience.

As you peruse our reviews of keyword tools, and conduct your own subsequent comparison shopping, you will find many other interesting and useful features sprinkled into the various software packages. Many of these have great value, like Misspelling Tools for finding the most commonly misspelled variants of popular keywords, a great way to capture parts of your market that otherwise may slip straight through the cracks.

You’ll notice that the price range varies tremendously with these tools. Some products come with a one-time fee, others are full membership services with a regular subscription fee. Remember that you’re spending money now to save and make money later (by systematically increasing your ROI – Return on Investment).

To get the most from your investment, choose a keyword tool that provides current data that is constantly updated. Choose a keyword tool that draws from multiple sources, particular the major search engines, and even more particularly those search engines on which you aim to advertise. Then compare the size of their database and evaluate the usefulness of the unique features each product offers. Then sign up for their free trial (or look into their refund policy – we’ve noted it where we can). Give it a try, examine the results. And then decide whether you’ve found the keyword tool for you, or whether the search continues.