The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound Keywords are the heart and soul of Google AdWords. Get the right keywords in place from the beginning and everything that follows becomes that much easier.
After you’ve created your initial list of keywords, you can use Google‘s Keyword Planner to add a few more and then begin the refining process. To get started, you need an AdWords account. If you haven’t opened one yet, now’s the time.
The advantage of the Keyword Planner comes from Google’s massive storehouse of data that it uses to find new keywords for you and to predict their cost and value.
Find the Keyword Planner under “Tools” at the very top of the AdWords page. On the front end, the Keyword Planner presents you with five options to begin your research:
- Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category. Enter a keyword or a URL, and Google will give you a whole bunch of ideas to get you started.
- Get search volume data and trends. If you type in any of the keywords from your existing list, Google will give you an estimate of the number of people who are searching on each of these phrases each month.
- Multiply keyword lists to get new keywords. This feature takes two distinct types of keyword lists and combines them into one master list. For example, you could have one list of your products and a second list of all the various colors in which your products are available.
This may seem like a clever feature, but it’s not a particularly useful one. The master list you end up with will contain scores of obscure keyword combinations that will receive little or no traffic. Google could penalize you for this by showing your ads less frequently or requiring you to bid more for your keywords.
The other two options help you plan your budgets and forecast spend, but you can safely ignore those now.
Let’s focus on “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website…
