I thought I would never be writing a blog post about PPC keyword research with the amount of posts that I have come across regarding this topic. Usually it is something that I already implement like Google’s Keyword Tool, Search Based Keyword Tool, Trends, Insights, Analytics, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and so on. As you can see there are many ways to do keyword research, and from all different angles. Today I am going to share one of my favorite ways to do both keyword and negative keyword research.

As you may all know within the Google Adwords platform you have the capability for the keyword tool to crawl website content, which will then spit out keywords related to the content of the page. Most people would plug-in the domain for the account they are working on which makes perfect sense, but I have found that majority of the time I get better results using the “descriptive words or phrases” feature.

With that being said I have discovered a great way to make the website content keyword generator to work in your favor.  With any client you are usually going to be able to pick one or two of the most general keywords for that client.  For this example I am going to choose the keyword “auto insurance.”   After you choose a general keyword you will take that word and do a search for it on ask.com.  I know, who would have ever thought ask.com would come into play during the keyword research process.   The thing is when you do a search on Ask, it also gives you a list of related search terms on the right hand side, and no this is not where you will find your keyword gems.  Once you do a search on that keyword you will take the URL of the search result, which in this case was http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=auto+insurance, and paste it into the Adwords Keyword Tool.  Hit generate and just like that you have tons of additional keywords, as well as discovering even more potential negative keywords. You will be surprised at the number of keywords and its variations that it will generate. This tactic also works using an online thesaurus, yes even for a term like “auto insurance,” give it a try and you will see what I am talking about.

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