As more and more businesses turn to paid search to generate cost effective leads, the resources are not always available to cover expensive software subscriptions for keyword research. This is where the free keyword and advertising tools from Google can come in handy.

Google Sets

Google Sets is a free tool which can help to expand your search phrases for your businesses. This tool allows you to enter up to five keyword phrases which pertain to your business. You can then choose a small set, which will generate 15 or fewer items, or a large set, which will provide a much more extensive list of phrases.

In my experience, you would not want to cut and paste the list of results to your pay per click campaign because the results are not always going to be exactly what you need. However, the results can help you come up with extended keywords and phrases to add to your paid search campaign.

Try it now at http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Ad Preview Tool

If you are a Google pay per click advertiser, how many times a day to you find yourself searching your keywords, just to find out who might be bidding against you? If you are monitoring your placement, as well as competitor placement, Google’s Ad Preview tool is something that you should be using. When you continuously run a search for your bidding keywords, without clicking on your ads, Google may determine your own ads are irrelevant to you and stop showing them to you.

Try it now at https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Google External Keyword Tool

I have always used Google’s External Keyword Generator when I am formulating my list of keywords and keyword phrases to target for a search engine optimization campaign, as well as my paid search campaigns. This is a scaled down version of the tool that is available to you when you log in to your Google Ad Words campaign, but if you are not a Google advertiser, you can still use the tool to not only generate ideas for your other campaigns, but also export the results in a easy to manage form. If you are a Google Ad Words advertiser, log in to your account to use their keyword generator. It is much more in depth.

Try it now at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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Angie Commorato is an Indianapolis web designer and online marketing specialist and owner of Indianapolis web design and marketing company, a&g Digital Consulting, LLC.

Tags: a&g Digital Consulting, Angie Commorato, free pay per click tools, Google keyword generator, Google Sets, Indianapolis paid search management, Indianapolis pay per click, Indianapolis website marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Misc, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Website Marketing. 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.