There are many keyword tools that exist on the market and some of them are quite expensive while others are free. You may feel pressured to buy the most expensive one because Gurus are hammering your inbox with promotions for these. I have used most of them and will share with you exactly what you need to know about keyword selection tools No BS and no affiliate links. There are several main types of keyword selection tools that are commonly used for PPC Keyword Research: 1. Spy Tools - There are two main types of these and all of them are paid and are often very expensive. a) Tools that provide competitor intelligence information (what your competitors are bidding on) that are updated infrequently. The disadvantage of these is that they do not provide real time data. The biggest advantage is that they have large databases with up to 1 billion keywords! They also often provide SEO keywords that your competitors are optimizing for. Examples of these include keywordspy.com and spyfu. b) Tools that provide real time data that allow you to see assess how long people have been running ads on various keywords. This should give you the ability to make an educated guess about whether people are making money with certain keywords. These tools generally focus on keywords that are getting traffic and do have an extensive database like the ones that are described above. WARNING: Just because someone else is making money with a particular keyword and/or offer does not guarantee that you will. There are a LOT of factors such as quality score, ad position, ad copy, landing page and url differences that can drastically affect the profitability of a campaign. These keyword selection tools will often provide "training" that teaches you to clone other people's campaigns. Do not ever do this. Do your own keyword research! Trust me on this one. 2. Tools that return long tail and related keywords based on a seed keyword - Some of these are paid while some are free. Free ones include Google Keyword tool or Yahoo Overture Keyword tool. An example of a paid tool is wordtracker.com. These are great as they can save you time so that you don't have to manually think about all plural versions or past present and future tenses of verbs and other variations that are common with the keyword phrase in question. These should return to you the majority of closely related keywords that actually are getting traffic so you don't waste time building campaigns around keywords that no one is searching for. Everyone should be using these regardless of what other paid services he/she may be using. 3. Tools that use one or more tools described in #2 to save time. Some of these may provide SEO competition data, filtering options and a variety of other bells and whistles. Most of these keyword selection tools are paid. My favorite is Keyword Research Pro as you get advanced filtering options that are not available in excel. Other examples of such tools are keyword elite, traffic travis etc...All of these keyword selection tools have different advanced features that may or may not help you. This is not a product review so I will not be getting into the details of these here. I suggest that everyone start with tool type #2 as listed above. The trick here is to brainstorm on your own and generate the seed keywords that get traffic and plug them into these tools and grabbing all the related ones that you can that are related to your offer. NEVER export keywords from ANY tool and blindly start bidding on them. This is not a strategy. Use tool type #3 to save you time once you figure out what you are doing and use tool type #1 sparingly. Consider these to be a luxury and use them only to get ideas of what might be working or ideas that may help you generate more seed keywords that can be plugged into tool types 2 and 3. I will be discussing keyword research in more detail in future posts but this should give you some more insight into the different types of keyword selection tools that are out there.
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