Hello Everyone,

We decided to kick off the year with a list of PPC & SEO keyword research tools that we use here at Rise Interactive.  A number of these are old hat but we feel there are a few new tools in the space that may provide you with that extra insight that you’ve been longing for.

Keyword Ideas – Ever had a hard time flushing out additional variations on keywords with high traffic? Below is a list of some tools we use to get ideas for similar keywords.

Hmmm what keywords will work for us?

1. Keyword Map:  Keyword Map is a tool that shows a visual representation of similar keywords on two axes.  One of the axis is for keywords which are different but related to your search keyword, and the other is for keywords which contain your search keyword.

2. Quintura: Like KW Map Quintura is a tool that shows a visual representation of similar keywords. However they use a  keyword cloud that can be refined allowing the user to remove non-relevant keywords and increase focus on terms they deem important. To the right of the cloud they show the actual SERP’s (Powered By Yahoo) for the query in question as well as results for images (Powered by Yahoo), Video ( Powered by Blinkx), and Amazon.

3. Touchgraph: Touchgraph allows for the creation and navigation of interactive graphs.  Think of Quintura but on steroids.  It also has relationship charts for Facebook and Amazon.

4. Google Search Based Keyword Tools: This tool just recently came on the marketplace and I’m extremely surprised to see that it hasn’t gotten more press in the blogsphere.  Google’s SBKT generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. If you are logged into your Adwords account it will also look at your existing keyword coverage and make recommendations on additional keywords you should examine.

5. Google Suggest: This tool is one that’s often overlooked by most people. Ever noticed that when you go to Google and start typing a search query a list of SUGGESTED keywords will appear below with a list of current advertisers appearing in the SERPs. One trick that I often use when I’m struggling to think of new keywords is to start with my root keyword phrase and start punching in letter by letter on the keyboard to see what Google suggests. I’ve included a quick Google Suggest “how to” video to help illustrate an example.

6. MSN Entity Association Graph: The Entity Association Graph is MSN’s attempt at the 5 tools above. Unfortunately, I haven’t been overly impressed with the results generated by MSN Ad Labs tools. It’s probably due to their market share and the amount of data they are able to pull from vs. Google or Yahoo even.  I think it’s noteworthy to mention because it shows another search engine’s take on keyword relationships vs. solely Google. Plus it’s packaged in with some other pretty cool tools by MSN that I’ll get to later.

Competitor Information – The surest way to develop a keyword list is to look at your competition and see what they are up to. Below is a list of tools to help:

What's the competition up to?

1.  Spyfu: This tool allows you to download your competitors keywords for both SEO and PPC. It also shows you their estimated daily ad budget,  average number of clicks, and average ad postion.

a. Spyfu Ad History: Ad history just launched last week. It’s an additional service that you can access if you have a premium membership. It’s a pretty unbelievable tool. It will show you a 1 year chronicle of all ads running on a specific keyword by your competitors. You can use this tool to see what ads your competition was running in the previous month, at what position the ad was running, and when the ad was last changed.

2.  Spyfu Kombat: Kombat is a service that is provided by Spyfu. It’s compares your keyword coverage for PPC & SEO against 2 of your competitors. It shows the lack of keyword coverage and overlap of your keywords for both PPC & SEO amongst all  3 companies via a venn diagram. The best part of it is that you can click on segments of the venn diagram where you lack keyword coverage and it will show you a complete list of terms missing with their corresponding CPC’s, estimated clicks per day, and max clicks per day. You can get the same information for the keywords you overlap on. All of this information can be exported to excel.

4.  SEMRush:  Used to go by another name, SEOdigger. SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to analyze Google search results. SemRush shows you keywords for any domain that is ranking high enough to be in top 20 natural or AdWords results. One of the best features is that is shows you the projected number of clicks for the keyword with the corresponding position.

5.  Adgooroo: If you’ve got the budget check out this tool. It’s got a bountiful treasure trove of SEM keyword tools. Problem is they charge $100 to $400 a month for subscription.

Stay tuned for our next blog post as we will discuss keyword forecasting, estimating search volume, building keyword list, and user intent.

Rise Interactive is a full-service Chicago Internet marketing firm specializing in PPC and SEO.

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Tags: keyword research, paid search, ppc, seo

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Paid Search (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.