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The Magic of AdWords

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February 9, 2011

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Most business owners use AdWords tools to improve traffic to a website by paying for ads. This post is about how you can use three AdWords tools to improve webpages and blog content.


There are many keyword tools on the market today and sorting out which ones are the best is not easy, so for this post, we’ll review the three tools that Google offers directly in the AdWords dashboard: The Keyword Tool, the Traffic Estimator and the Placement Tool. You can find all of these tools under the Reporting and Tools tab in the AdWords dashboard. You can watch the YouTube video that I created below. 


Naturally, Google built these tools to help you buy advertisements and you may decide to do that at different times in your marketing efforts, but these tools will also help you create and polish actual site and blog content.


Build a List of Relevant Keywords


Keyword Tool: This is one of Google’s most popular tools. Think of it as your own private brainstorming tool. You can insert terms or keywords that you believe will be important to your article or blog post and the tool will return a longer list of relevant terms that it finds.


One of my favorite ways to leverage the Keyword Tool is allow it to find keywords based upon your website content. You don’t have to enter terms in this case, but you just enter the URL of your or another website and the AdWords system will study your site and suggest keywords. There are times when I take an existing article I’m working on, but have not yet posted officially, and load it into a test site that I maintain and then have Google crawl that page. The relevant keywords I receive help me to improve the content.



Determine Relevance and Popularity for an Idea


Traffic Estimator: This is a fast way to get to approximate search volume for a specific term or phrase. This is useful in many ways, but one major one I prefer:  If you believe a phrase, “Small Business Technology” is the one that will drive awareness to your company, search it in Google’s Traffic Estimator. The results show that 6,600 people searched for that phrase globally last month.


However, if you change the term to “Small Business Software,” the results show 90,500 people searched that term last month. Note: This post is not about SEO and rank, so it doesn’t mean you can appear on page one of Google for the term just because you write about it. It gives you an idea of how relevant and timely the topic is, which can help you write to a market pain point. Search traffic volume can help you refine a message based on what the market searches for on a daily basis.


Find Niche Content Sites that are Related to Keywords


Placement Tool: What is different about this tool is it can tell you where to advertise in the Google Ad and Content network. It lists each site that it identifies with the terms you’ve typed in. The way that I use this tool is to find other sites worth studying around core terms.


Overall, the Google AdWords tools were built to create focused, targeted, relevant advertisements alongside search results. But using these techniques, you can determine the best phrases, most searched keywords, to make your content more relevant and timely for your readers. There’s lots more that wasn’t covered, so share your tips and ideas and best practices in the comments below.

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  • Roger Ach 1 year 3 months and 26 days ago

    Roger Ach

    Good post ! @AdWords are terrific, but #Transactional Video makes it 2X to 3X more effective than static Text and Display. Use #vADz #VideoCoupons and #VideoAds to maximize engagement, generate sales with #vADz.com integrated eCommerce.

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