Google’s new search-based Keyword Tool

Finding and testing new keywords is one of the most important parts of any AdWords campaign. There are a variety of tools and services (both free and paid-for) to help you in this task and Google have launched a new keyword tool which is currently in Beta testing in the UK and USA.

The difference with Google’s search-based Keyword Tool is that this one looks at your landing page and cross-references it with their vast amounts of search data to find out what keywords people are using to find your products and services. It looks at your landing page and any additional keywords that you enter and finds relevant user searches that have occurred on Google over the last year. It will then give an indication of search volume and the bid price for a top-three position.

On paper it seems similar to the existing (and notoriously unreliable) keyword tool in AdWords but it works differently and seemingly much better. It appears to base it’s results on general search data rather than just AdWords data and it gives more information that is extremely useful if it proves to be accurate. It will find keyword suggestions that are not currently in your AdWords campaigns and give you the option to add them.

Another very useful aspect of the tool is the related keywords that it generates which can be a great source of ideas for your negative keywords. [This is a very important aspect of optimising your campaigns by reducing the number of irrelevant impressions - new article on this subject coming soon]. Because these lists are derived from actual search data and are weighted by the number of queries you can often find some very high-volume but completely irrelevant terms that may be triggering your ads wrognly and dragging down your CTR without you realising it.

Early days yet to see how good this tool really is but it’s certainly worth trying. I’m going to be using for a while at least – I’ll let you know how get on with it. If you’ve used it, please share your experiences in the comments below.

Tags: adwords, keywords, tools

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 6:04 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.