The Google Keyword Estimator, is a completely free tool from Google to find keywords and keyword phrases to use when advertising with their Adwords advertising progam. Using the Google Keyword Estimator you’ll be able to pick out keywords lazer-targeted for your audience, allowing you to tap into streams of new customers and prospects.
What’s Hot
The best part about the Google Keyword Estimator is that it’s free. Won’t cost you a cent. Zilch, zipp, nada. Which is excellent for anyone stepping into Internet marketing, where small startups are very often do-it-at-home jobs with limited budgets.
The tool shows those words and phrases that people are searching for on Google. You can literally read the minds of everyone using Google search. Which gives great insight into the market and what they’re looking for.
The tool allows for both analyzing another site and determining its keywords. Think: spying on the competition.
OR
Entering your own keyword or keywords, and the tool will automatically pick out matching or similar phrases and keywords to use.
What’s Not
Well, the old adage of getting what you pay for does apply here. Although it’s a great tool there are definite limits on how deep the keyword research goes. For a popular keyword like “computer” the number of searches is massive and the competition is huge, extremely difficult to get a foot in the door there.
Limited in scope. Google may be the king for the moment, but they are certainly not the entire kingdom. There are other search engines out there, and we assume they will be about the same. But Google tends to be a more technically savvy crowd (in general) and internationally, for example in Taiwan, Yahoo! has a very strong hold on things.
How To Use It
In this past week I’ve been watching the videos from Niche Profit Classroom on how they find keywords for small, profitable niche sites. One comparisson in particular, will literally explode the effectiveness of your keyword research, avoiding countless wasted hours on overly competitive keywords.
Perform the keyword search.
Sort the list by search volume.
Start with listings with less than ten thousand searches per month.
For each keyword, note the search volume. Then go to Google search and search for the keyword in ” ” (eg “desktop computers” with quotation marks).
For any phrase with less than 10,000 competing pages, you have at least a good phrase. The fewer competitors, the easier it will be for your site to appear in the first spot on Google, where you will probably get at least a third of those searches clicking through to your site. And if there are more than 1,000 searches per month according to the keyword tool, you have a gem.
Completely avoid keywords with over 20,000 results in Google search, they’re too competitive.
Once you’ve narrowed down the list, get started with all the usual bookmarking, networking and article posting.
NOTE: This post is an example of this technique in action. “Google Keyword Estimator” fit all these criteria, so I wrote this post. It’s like I read your mind. Or keyboard… or whatever.