Keyword Research Tools: Overview

Keyword research tools are essential to your Adwords campaign:  terrific Adword tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool and best-of-breed, Market Samurai.

Adwords professionals use them for advertising on Google.

Most Adwords amateurs don’t.

Guess who’s more likely to have a profitable Google Ad Words campaign?

Guess who’s not?

Finding---and effectively using---highly relevant, targeted keywords are crucial to Adwords advertising success yet, surprisingly, 90% of all keywords don’t generate enough daily traffic to achieve profitability.

Every craftsman, mechanic, artist, and professional---except most self-proclaimed "webmasters"--- uses tools every day.  

Without a paintbrush, Rembrandt would have been finger painting.  Absent wrenches and screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, there'd be no Eiffel Tower.

Yet, though they always rely on tools in their day jobs, the overwhelming majority of website creators---and even Google advertisers---don't have a web building tool chest.  And, not surprisingly, they fail.

How odd!  Particularly when some of the best research tools are free or nearly so.

Free Keyword Research Tools

There’s a plethora of online keyword research tools, many free and some paid, but  Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Market Samurai’s Keyword Research Module (both free) stand apart from the rest. 

For several years, Google’s Keyword Tool ruled the roost of Adwords pay per click research tools, but today the Market Samurai Keyword Research Module reigns supreme and is head and shoulders above the Adwords Keyword Tool in our judgment because it does far more in less time.  

If you’re serious about advertising on Google, we recommend checking out both of these keyword research tools in more depth on this site and forming your own judgment. 

These two programs, though free, are so important that I'm going to devote several separate pages to each.

We’ve verified that you will get the free Market Samurai Keyword Research Module, just click, simply for looking over the product (no purchase necessary):

Hi Victor, 

Thanks for your email. 

You're correct, access to the Keyword Research module and the Domains module are both free for life, regardless of whether a user makes a purchase or not. 

In addition to Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Market Samurai’s Keyword Research Module there are several other keyword research tools that might prove useful in your Google Ad Words marketing campaign.

However, before describing these other tools, it’s important to understand the strategy that many Adwords professionals recommend for advertising on Google.

Start with 5-10 highly relevant targeted keywords (expand your list as you become profitable) having these characteristics:

• Daily traffic of 100 or higher (higher the better)
• Less than 100,000 competing pages on Google for each keyword (lower the better)
• Low strength of competition for sites on the first page of Google
• Good Commercial Intent

Earlier, we mentioned that 90% of all keywords don’t generate enough daily traffic to produce profitability. Hence, avoid keywords with daily traffic under 50 (even better, under 100).

And. . .as to "competing pages", the number "100,000" is a guide.  I prefer >80,000 but these are becoming more difficult to find.  If you have a choice of a keyword with 100,000 competing pages or another with 200,000, you're more likely to get ranked with the smaller number of competing pages.

Perhaps because this research can be quite time consuming---or maybe because they don’t know how to use keyword research tools effectively---many Google Ad Words marketers never attain the type of success for which they hope.  Truth is, there’s a wealth of valuable data from Google that can be extracted from the two tools above as well as these other free tools:

Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool

Introduced in November 2008, this is a useful tool if you’re already advertising on Google because it will look over your site and identify other keywords that might have a positive Return on Investment (ROI). 

Additionally, some Adwords professionals use it as a competitive analysis tool to analyze a competitor’s keywords.

Google Sets

This is a simple tool that takes a few ideas and expands them into larger sets of ideas.  Though you can enter five different ideas, start with just one or two very broad ideas (i.e., cars, mortgage, home, etc.)  instead of specific ideas.

Google Insights for Search

This tool, among the more complex of the keyword research tools, allows you to compare information three ways:

1.  Search terms---you can compare 5 different groups and 25 keywords

2.  Locations---See where search volumes are higher

3.  Time Ranges---Compare search volumes by different time frames

Google Trends

This tool allows you to look backward at historical trends over several years and is useful in showing changes in such things as keyword search volumes (seasonality) and even (seasonal) changes in visitors to a website.

Paid Subscription Keyword Research Tools

There are also a number of paid keyword tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. 

Wordtracker has been around a long time and is probably the most popular commercial product.

Many Adwords professionals have found these tools useful when researching keywords but both have the same limitation:  neither draws data from Google (which has 70% of all the online searches) and, instead, take data from other search engines and extrapolates the data to estimate search volume.

And, they can be costly. Word Tracker is a subscription product, $69/mo. ot $379/yr.

Note:  Unlike Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, the Market Samurai Keyword Research Module draws data directly from Google and is thus in tune with 70% of the world’s online searches.  We recommend relying on Google or Market Samurai to estimate traffic.

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