So you want to launch a paid search (a.k.a.: pay-per-click (PPC)) marketing campaign? It’s really not that hard to kick one off. Really…anyone can do it. The challenge is in geting a positive return on your investment (ROI). Obviously you want to be sure that if you stand to profit $5 from the sale of a product you spend less than $5 in PPC traffic to get that sale (*rare exceptions do apply). The right keyword list is absolutely…key. Here are some great FREE tools to help you generate a great keyword and keyphrase list.
Continuing the example above, it might be easy to get 50 visitors to your site for $5 (it might be impossible, depending on your keyword list, but stay with me here) – but if none of them buy your product you paid $5 for 50 near-worthless visitors. It’s not all about how many people you can get to land on your site (some people will try to sell you “traffic,” as if it’s implicitly valuable) it’s about how many of those visitors actually ‘convert‘ (into customers). So, consider that more specific keywords and phrases usually convert better than generic ones. They generally cost less, too. One of the easiest ways to ruin your ROI is to use the most generic, popular keywords and key phrases you can think of for your PPC campaign.
Find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. If you have competitors who are already successful in the paid search market, why not take what they’ve done and see if it works for you. Some people even include their competitors trademark names in their keyword list, although this controversial practice is frowned upon by others.
The good news is that there are some excellent tools out there to help you generate a healthy keyword and key phrase list. Take advantage of all the resources and you’ll soon be struggling to keep your keyword list a manageable size. That problem opens up a whole other can of worms. Meanwhile, here are just a few of the tools you can use to generate and refine your keyword list:
Google’s Keyword Tool: no list would be complete without Google’s keyword tool. Google has more data in this space than anyone, and their recommendations are as good as anyone’s. Start here first.
Microsoft adCenter Labs’ Search Funnel: See the top searches before and after a given search was performed. This relatively new tool is currently only functional for the broadest search terms.
Yahoo! (Overture)’s Keyword Selector Tool: See actual related search results from past months on Yahoo – based on a keyword or phrase you enter.
UltraSeeker.com’s Keyword Filter: Copy and paste the list from the Overture keyword tool and generate a ‘filtered’ list of only the valuable keywords
Keyword Permutations Tools (Web Based): Generate all the permutations (variations / varied arrangements) of the keywords / key phrases you provide.
- RustyBrick’s Keyword Phrase Tool
- Keyword Permutations Tool from KeywordLizard
CovertSEM.com’s Keyword Research Engine: A new free keyword research too just released by CovertSEM.com. Essentially it can add power, size, info, product-based or demographic keywords to your root word to generate expanded key phrases you may not have thought of.
SEOBook.com’s Typo Generator: Misspellings are a great way to turn popular generic keywords (i.e.: ipod) into less popular, but more affordable misspelled keywords (i.e.: ipodd).
SEOBook.com’s SEO Tools: Not all the tools on this page apply to keyword lists but this is such a good resource it’s worth browsing. It is one of the most extensive collections of free SEO and SEM tools on the web. It does include various keyword list tools, too.
JonathanLeger.com’s AdWords City, State Keyword Generator: This tool will generate a list of city and/or state combinations for any keywords you provide, allowing you to target every city and state in the USA (and territories) in your AdWords campaigns. It will give you the list in phrase, broad or exact match to pop right into Adwords.
Examples:
cosmetic dentist Los Angeles CA
cosmetic dentist Bell Gardens CA
or switch keyword order – Beverly Hills CA cosmetic dentist
JonathanLeger.com’s AdWords Occupations Keyword Tool: This tool will generate a list of occupations combined with any keywords you provide, allowing you to target almost 1,000 job titles in your AdWords campaigns.
JonathanLeger.com’s AdWords Keyword Generation Tool: This tool will generate a new list of AdWords keywords based on a set of lists you
provide.
DigitalPoint.com’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
* There are some exceptions to the ROI argument above. For example, large companies often bid high prices on popular keywords (in order to rank high in paid search listings) as a “branding exercise” – a marketing investment, rather than an ROI consideration. But I’m going to assume that you can’t afford to do that. Anyway, Google now uses a “quality score” (not just bid price) to determine where paid search listings rank in their listings, so you can’t get a top paid search ranking simply by being the highest bidder anymore.
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