Keyword research is the most critical phase in creating a Google Adwords campaign. It is vitally important for your success. Don’t even think about skipping this step or spending less time on this step.

There are a few different tools that you can use for keyword research. If you have the site build it software then you will have all the keyword research tools you need incorporated into the software. Otherwise you will need to use Wordtracker and the Overture suggestion tool. Google also has a suggestion tool which can help you, but it is not as useful as Wordtracker or the Overture tool. Overture is a free tool that you can use, and Wordtracker is a paid service (but you can get a free trial to test it out).

Using Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a very interesting brainstorming tool to look up keywords. It is also a great resource for search engine optimization. Wordtracker has a thorough database of millions of keywords and keyphrases which you can utilize. They have a free trial version which gives an idea about the kind of service they provide.

Most advertisers wrongly limit the number of people searching for a particular product. This is a strategic blunder that many businesses commit unknowingly. They forget to take into consideration other related aspects and hence limit their vision. If you are manufacturing baby strollers and you think that the only people who will buy your product will be new parents, then you are probably wrong. Friends, colleagues, grand-parents, soon-to-be-parents/expectant parents, wholesalers/retailers of baby-related items, are some of the people searching for that. You need to take a look at the bigger picture and do your research accordingly. Here, Wordtracker is a nifty tool which takes care of most of your worries. It also helps to find common spelling mistakes that people make while searching online, like baby strolers, baby strullers, babby strollers, and so on.

Wordtracker recommends that you look at the bigger picture as well and don’t limit your searches to closed options, like if you want Austin powers soundtrack, search under ‘soundtracks’ and then you can restrict your search at a later stage. Do not narrow your choices at the very first stage, otherwise you will lose some of the great internet traffic.

Wordtracker helps you study your client’s surfing behavior and you can utilize the keywords accordingly. It also helps you find negative keywords that you can include in your Google AdWords campaign.

Wordtracker will suggest to you real keywords and phrases which are used by real people on the internet, but you still have to do all the rest of the work like actually eliminating irrelevant keywords and choosing the right set of words and phrases for your campaign.

Using the Overture keyword tool

Overture offers a free keyword research tool. This is a comprehensive database of a variety of keywords. When you feed in a keyword, it searches for it in its database to come up with plenty of options for that word, it uses the singular as well as plural version of the keyword you entered. In many cases, Overture displays multi word phrases with the words in alphabetical order, not the way people actually enter them into search engines. You should not depend on such tools blindly, but instead follow your own insight and make some intelligent deductions to come up with the right set of keywords.

The Overture tool is best used for identifying keywords which can be purchased on the Overture website, but it can also be a starting point to do a preliminary research for keywords to optimize your site.

How to do your keyword research

Your goal when researching keywords is to come up with as many keyword phrases as possible, and as many variations of the type of phrase that people are typing into Google. You will need to spend a significant amount of time on keyword research. A good indication is that you should spend 6-8 hours on keyword research per area that you are trying to optimize. When you get better at it, you can hone your skills and decrease the time to 2-3 hours.