Limeshot – Graphic Design Sydney

So far, it seems the new AdWords Keyword Tool shapes up to be the most exciting event of my month. I can already hear people say I must have a sad life, but hear me out.

In a spectacular move that will be a second blow to Hitwise’s business model, Google has finally taken pity on poor SEOs and won’t let us blunder through the dark anymore, bumping our heads against walls and trying to make sense out of third party search volume data. We can now get the numbers straight from the horse’s mouth.

So let’s cut to the chase: what we can do with this new toy?

1. We can put it to work scouring our own website to help identify high traffic keywords to better optimise for. For example, I fed the engine my URL and realised I should play up the page about my printing services – “print” brings in some 450,000 searches on average, “printing” and”printers” 368,000 each.

2. Broaden the keyword portfolio: the tool will suggest “related” keywords, another opportunity to make sure we optimise for all the important terms in the long tail.
3. Use copy that is not live on your website to generate keywords – for pages that are not yet up.
4. Even more interesting, ask it to scour the competitors’ websites for THEIR keywords.
5. Determine the most appropriate directory structure: the tool automatically groups keywords derived from copy or website content into “relevance” groups. For example for my website the selected groups are graphic design, web design, internet marketing, etc. All these are high traffic keywords that one would use as directories. Obviously, a bit of discernment is necessary when using the tool for this purpose, but it does come in useful.
6. Draft a comprehensive keyword list before having a website, or just performing a quick and dirty comparison between 2-3 keywords. This little engine also takes whatever keywords are thrown at it and creates a semantic neighbourhood, in a surprisingly sane manner.
7. Selecting a domain based on the above list, or use it to plan content
8. Budget your PPC campaigns without having an AdWords account. The tool spells out the estimated PPC for positions 1-3 – just make sure you select “Show all” from the drop-down box.
9. Follow the seasonality of the search volumes – rather useful for planning PPC campaigns for cyclical industries. Now if we could only get some statistics regarding the CPC trends…

10. Figure out what your competitors are doing – not only with their websites but with their portfolio of services and products or with the business model. I mean why waste time reading the respective websites, archives, press releases and all when a quick scan of the domain will rapidly unearth any major content categories.

Anyway, these are some interesting things you can do with Google’s new AdWords tool, even without having an AdWords account. For comprehensive instructions on using the tool Google provides a fairly comprehensive FAQ page: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=2591

Now back to snooping…

Related articles:

1. Google Trends for Websites exposes your ranking and traffic data...
2. Advanced Web Ranking...
3. Google Analytics: Advanced Segments – Beta Feature...