Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Making It Work For You

The Google Adwords keyword tool is a very well known, and highly used, tool for many online marketers. Many people use it for more than just running Pay Per Click Adwords campaigns. You can use this tool to narrow down a list of great keywords for your article marketing and search engine optimization needs to name just two.

When it comes to search engines Google is definitely one of the ‘big boys’ and since they have so much traffic on their search engine every single day, it only stands to reason that you can get very comprehensive keyword lists from their keyword tool.

When you are starting your keyword search, no matter what you are doing with those keywords, it’s usually a good idea to start with a fairly broad phrase. Once you’ve gotten a list you can narrow down on some of those terms.

To illustrate, let’s say you’re doing a search for the term ‘dog toys’ you will get many results and these results will be things like ‘tough dog toys’ and ‘interactive dog toys’. Then you can pick a few of the broad results and narrow those down further.

Take the term ‘tough dog toys’. When you do a search for that term you’ll get even more, and more refined, results such as ‘indestructible dog toys’. You’ll also get other results that may or may not work for you. Things such as ‘dog treats’ or ‘dog beds’.

With the more ‘honed down’ phrases, you’ll notice that they don’t get as many searches monthly as the broader phrases. That’s ok. Actually, in some ways, that’s better. Unless you have a huge advertising budget it’s unlikely that you can afford the high bid prices for the broad term of ‘dog toys’. The estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) is likely to be higher.

When you start paying over one dollar per click, you had better have a very highly converting offer. If you can convert one out of every ten visitors into a paying customer and you get over $10 per sale that’s not bad. But if you have to spend $50 for one sale and you only make $10, that’s not good. You won’t be able to stay so upside down in your advertising and be profitable, let alone stay in business for long.

Remember though that the ‘estimated average cost per click’ is just that: an estimate. Google, and the other search engines, seem to love to make things as complicated as possible. They will use their own, and usually secret, parameters for determining how much an advertiser will pay per click.

Generally, if you have a high quality score you can pay less per click for a given keyword than your competitor who has a low quality score will pay for the same keyword. It’s complicated, I know. That’s the reason you need to make sure you fully understand the ins and outs of PPC before you dive into the deep end of the pool.

Even if you do know what you’re doing there will be some ‘tweaking’ that will need to be done to optimize your results. Make sure you have enough money to run your campaigns long enough to do the ‘tweaking’ and really get the most out of your adwords campaign and the Google Adwords keyword tool.