05.15.08
Keyword Tools
Tony Rocks!
Hey, just wanted to get your attention and remembered how you liked that intro…
OK, I’ve been looking and learning (and some doing) for months. I still feel like Keywords are a major skill that needs to be developed. It seems EVERYTHING on the internet relies on Keyword Research. (Please feel free to disagree!)
Anyhow, can you tell me what are some of your Keyword tools or how you go about researching for Keywords?
Appreciate any thoughts and pointers you want to share!
Carl
Administrator said,
May 18, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Carl Rocks!
I wouldn’t strongly disagree with the importance of choosing the right keywords. It is obviously critical to your success that your ads show for the most relevant search terms. There are two reasons, however, that I don’t focus on keywords as THE MOST important aspect of your success.
1. Its not that hard. Identifying the relevant keywords - even without the free tools available on most search engines - is generally pretty intuitive.
2. Ad Text offers the biggest opportunity to beat the competition.
You can argue that keywords are most important (and a bad keyword list will kill you), but I bet if you looked at the keyword list for almost any 20 people running ads for dating sites, for instance, the lists would be almost identical, especially for the high volume keywords, so I don’t think people need much help there, but not everybody is writing great ads, and a better ad makes a huge difference.
All that being said, there is still an opportunity - with keywords - to gain an edge against the competition, and even if it isn’t as big an edge as great ad text can be, its still worth talking about.
KeyCompete.com offers a keyword service that can identify not just a list of keywords, but tell you exactly which ones are getting the most traffic for any site you want them to look at. This can hep insure you don’t miss an important keyword, and it can help you see very quickly which keywords should receive most of your focus.
Most importantly, sometimes knowing the top keyword phrases for a site can give you important insight into what sort of ad text changes you might need. Maybe your ad for an online university includes the adjective “affordable”, you might be pleased to see tat adjective included in many of the popular searches, but then notice that the adjective “accredited” shows up in ten times the number of searches. You could probably safely infer that more people (even of the ones who didn’t think to use either adjective) care more about accreditation than affordabilty, and adjust your ad text to take advantage of that insight.
KeyCompete.com isn’t free, but its pretty cheap and will probably pay for itself several times over if you use it the right way.
I hope this helps.
Tony