Selecting Keywords

This is a preview to the chapter Selecting Keywords from the book Making the Most of Google Adwords by Tim Hill.
Please note this text is copyright protected.

It's not going to be possible to know your effective and loss making keywords at the offset. It will take some trial and error. In this chapter we'll cover:

how to choose keywords and phrases that people actually search;
how to find keywords and phrases are within your budget;
tools to look in detail and keywords and phrases.

Later we'll look at how to use Google Adwords and Analytics to refine your first selection.

For now we need to have a first stab so open up your Google Adwords account and lets get started.

Google's Keyword Tool

Around the internet, or in books published before August 2013, you will find a large number of references to Google's Keyword Tool. It has now been replaced by Google's Keyword Planner thus I would recommend you ignore anything you read related to the Keyword Tool as much has moved and it may cause you a great deal of confusion.

Instead, we need to know how to use Keyword Tool's successor, Keyword Planner ...

Google's Keyword Planner

Within Google Adwords open Tools and Analysis in the top menu and select Keyword Planner.

That's the end of the free preview ...

You can get the rest of this chapter,
and all the others, when you
buy Making the Most of Google Adwords

What else is in the chapter 'Selecting Keywords'?

A basic keyword search

Let's start by carrying out a basic search. In the left hand side click Search for New Keyword and Ad Group ideas which will open up further options. ...

Google Trends (Insights)

Google Trends can be found at http://www.google.com/trends/. I suggest you open this in a new window as we will be returning to discuss Adwords in a moment. ...

Back to Google Adwords

Now we have some idea of which keywords we might realistically be able to pursue and if they are trending in any particular direction. But what you are looking at ...

Broad Match

This is what happens if you just type your phrase straight in to the Keyword Planner and click search. It will show you the estimate cost of that phrase, and ...

The Broad Match Modifier

So the suggested bid is for a "Broad Match". We can modify this slightly by adding a '+' in front of any of the words the Keyword tool will now ...

Broad Match alternatives

Obviously accidently bidding for keywords and phrases you didn't even realise you were targeting is the kind of activity that makes Google's accountants very happy while doing an excellent job ...

The Phrase Match

Select this to show the suggested bid for searches that are your keyword or phrase or contain your keyword or phrase. ...

The Exact Match

This will return the suggested bid for the exact phrase only. ...

Some words of caution

Google's Keyword Planner is an estimate and users have found its results tend to vary, even on the same day. Treat it as a rough barometer for comparing options. So ...