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Keyword Research


Having started out with many of the paid research tools WordTracker and Keyword Discover I now prefer the Google and Microsoft Keyword Tools.  

Understanding Exact vs. Phrase vs. Broad Matching”

Many search engines use different matching levels which to filter ad targeting.

Exact match will only show for search results where the user searched specifically for your keyword phrase, and only your keyword phrase.

Phrase match will show when your exact phrase appears anywhere within the search query with the words in the same order.  Google may show broad match ads when people search for synonyms of your keywords, or if your broad match keywords appear in the search in any order your ads will display.  To test if Google sees it as a synonym try doing a ‘fuzzy search’ using the tilde [~car] will return results with ‘autos’ bolded.

Broad match can be useful for keyword mining and generating additional words to research.

 

Google Keyword Tool
Google’s External Keyword Free Tool

Pros:

  • It currently shows 12 months historical search trends
  • It can analyze a page or site for automatically recommending keywords
  • It allows users to focus on exact searches and not just broadsearches
  • Google has the most search query database and offers great multilingual depth.  
  • Google gives estimated cost, competition level, and suggests potential negative keywords
  • It can easily export your list as an XLS spreadsheet

Cons:

  • this tool is well integrated into the AdWords system. The relatively narrow selection of words they provide means more people bidding on the same words and checking their rankings constantly for that term thus inflating search volume and burning ad impressions.  Competitors have half a clue they should be bidding on these terms
  • Google may be motivated to show profitable words rather than non profitable words.
  • The estimates are rough, usually rounded off to the nearest 100  with head terms; however I have seen it provide numbers down to the term 12 for a rarefied trademark term.
  • If everyone has the same data it will turn into the ‘golden rule’ (those with the most money make the rules or rather win the bid, but a focus on quality score could help you prevail)

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Pros:

  • Excellent integration with Microsoft Excel
  • They have great segmentation tools that will show keywords by category
  • Great ’sanity check’ to estimate Keyword values and compare Google’s with Microsoft’s
  • Google has the most search query database and offers great multilingual depth.  
  • Google gives estimated cost, competition level, and suggests potential negative keywords
  • It can easily export your list as an XLS spreadsheet

Cons:

  • Microsoft only has 6% of the search market share by some estimates.
  • Google may be motivated to show profitable words rather than non profitable words.
  • The estimates are rough, usually rounded off to the nearest 100  with head terms; however I have seen it provide numbers down to the term 12 for a rarefied trademark term.
  • If everyone has the same data it will turn into the ‘golden rule’ (those with the most money make the rules or rather win the bid, but a focus on quality score could help you prevail)