Keyword Research Services & Tools for Google AdWords

Overview and Comparison of Top Keyword Service Tools for Pay Per Click Marketing

"If Content is King on the Internet, then Keywords are Queen."

-Ken Giddens

One of my favorite keyword tools is WordTracker. For most any term, they'll give you 200-300 related words and phrases that real people have recently typed into search engines. WordTracker will give you stuff you'd have never thought of. Take their service for a test drive for a day or a week (will cost you a few bucks) and I think you'll find it very useful.

Wordtracker Overview

Two of the most basic concepts I teach for keyword research are width and depth. Going wide means getting the entire vernacular of your industry. For golf that would mean not only obvious phrases like "golf lessons" and "putting" but a long list of terms like "Arnold Palmer" and "St Andrews" and "Bob Hope Chrysler Classic."

Wordtracker's Keyword Universe lateral search and thesaurus generates a wide array of related terms. Here's a screen shot for a lateral search on "golf travel":

Keyword depth is minute variations of closely related phrases. Google's "expanded phrase matching" allegedly makes this unnecessary, but you'll pay a premium price if you're not bidding on the term exactly.

You get the lowest click costs when you bid on terms exactly the way people type them in. So a deep search ("popularity search" on Wordtracker) generates a list like this:

Even the deep search produces a variety of narrow sub-niches which you can serve. The number of such niches is nearly infinite. Also notice the "Count" column which gives you a relative indication of that keyword's popularity.

Competition Search

How competetive are the keywords you're bidding on? Wordtracker Competition Search provides Keyword Effectiveness Index which is a ratio of the number of searches to the number of sites which contain that keyword:

Top 1000 Searches & Special Keyword Reports

Wanna see what's hot? What's really hot, right now (within the last 24 hours)? Wordtracker's Top 1000 reports are available in both long-term and short-term versions:

Wordtracker subscriptions are available in daily, weekly, monthly and yearly time periods.

AdWord Accelerator: An Ultra-Powerful Tool for Finding Unexploited Opportunities in Narrow Niches

(Note: AdWord Accelerator is a private service with limited membership and may be currently unavailable. But if you can get in, it is good.)

If you're working in a brutally competitive niche, if you're doing GoogleCash, traffic brokering or some kind of affiliate marketing, the secret to success is having a degree of keyword intelligence that others don't have, so you can find opportunities "down in the cracks of the sidewalk" so to speak. If this is what you are doing, then AdWord Accelerator is an outstanding tool.

AA has a keyword refinement mechanism that allows you to drill down into tiny phrase variations that produce 30%, 50%, 70% reductions in click prices. Rather than giving you screen shots, you should go to the AdWord Accelerator website and watch the video tutorial.

TheAdTool by Howard Jacobson and Rob Goyette

TheAdTool.net is a somewhat different sort of keyword tool. It's not so much about doing keyword research a la Wordtracker and AdWord Accelerator. Instead, the Ad Tool is especially designed to take keywords you've already generated and easily manipulate them. This can save you many hours of manual manipulation:

Suggests common misspellings and typos
Adds quotes and brackets
"Peel and Stickerizer" helps you extract laser focused AdGroups from your keyword lists
Finds plurals, alternate word forms and synonyms
Shows related terms people are searching on Overture and Google
Easily adds US States and/or Metropolitan areas before and/or after your keywords
Lets you subtract negative keywords

Keyword Research and refinement is the most time consuming part of Pay Per Click marketing, and if you use the right tools and shortcuts the job becomes a lot easier!

Other Kinds of Tools:

Shopping Carts, Autoresponders and Email Delivery Services

Testing and Traffic Conversion Tools & Services

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Perry S. Marshall & Associates is an independent consulting & publishing firm, and is not affiliated with Google.