Whether you are drafting a new Adwords campaign, or trying to improve an existing campaign, finding good search words is a difficult job. Nevertheless it truly are those search words who make up a big part of a well converting campaign. The website can be so beautiful, the advertisement texts seductive, but when a campaign doesn’t have the right search words, your campaign will never be profitable. It is important to not only look at “positive” but also “negative” search words during your journey to find the right search words. If you find a search word which looks like one of your positive search words, but which means something completely different, it is smart to take that word into your negative search word list. Take, for example, the word “free” in combination with a product. If you do not give away free products, it is not smart to spend your Adwords budget on people searching for free products. Mind you: if you put the word "free" on your negative search word list, people looking for "free shipping" can not see your advertisement.

Luckily there are a couple of user friendly tools to make our work easier. At the next page you can find a list of steps for finding the right search words for your Adwords campaign.

1. Google’s Keyword Tool

Google knows it can be a hard job to search for search words. Of course it's completely in the interest of Google to help us with it. The Google Keyword Tool can for example be used in the following two ways.

A) Search websites on frequent search words

You can insert a URL and the Keyword Tool will search the concerning website on the search words used. If you already have an idea about which kind of search words you want to find, you can insert them and the tool will search for similar search words. If you are drafting a new campaign it might be better not to do this. So, if you do not enter search words yourself, your insight will be as brought as possible. Which websites to search? Everything which has to do with your section! Starting at your own website. Then search the websites of your direct competitors. After this you can search related news sites, blogs and forums. Everything which has to do with the products. Services you sell can give you new insights on how your customers search on Google.

B) Let the Keyword Tool give more suggestions based on the search words you already found.

After you have set up a small list of search words by searching the above websites, you can enter these search words in the Keyword Tool to get suggestions per search word. There will be suggestions you can take into your search words list, but also suggestions which are not relevant at all and suggestions for your negative search word list. If you use the Keyword Tool, do not forget to configure the settings for location and language.

2. Information from Google Analytics

Hopefully you already use Google Analytics for your website. If you don't, this will have a priority. Google Analytics provides you an enormous amount of information about the behaviour of customers on your website.

Under the tabpage “Standard reporting”, head “Traffic Sources” > “Search” > “Organic” you will find the most common organic keywords.

Use this list to complement your existing search word list. You can also view this list, filtered by search words who did lead to conversion. For this, make a new "Custom Segment" under “Advanced Segments”, to filter out all visitors who didn't convert. These are extra important search words you could research more.

3. Information from the internal search engine of your website.

The search words used in your internal search engine on your site, give you information about what people who just landed on your site, searched for. You can view this information under Google Analytics. Of course this requires having Google Analytics configured within your website. You can use the list of search words your visitors looked for at your own website, to complement your existing list. You really can get a lot of information from the search tasks of your visitors for individual pages or products. When a page shows a high search percentage within your own website, this means the visitor did not find what he was looking for on that page.

4. Google Suggest

The list with search words prepared, probably would not contain many Long-Tail search words yet. Especially these search words are very important for a profitable campaign. To go from general, Short-Tail search words to more specific, Long-Tail search words, you can use Google Suggest. These are tips you will get when you are typing your search task in Google.

Of course it is way too much work to type in each search word in the Google search bar and note the given suggestions. A smarter way to get information of Google Suggest is with our free online tool: “AdwordsRobot Suggest & Autocomplete Scraper".

In this tool you can enter a search word and immediately see every suggestion for this search word in alphabetical order. Did you find any interesting suggestions? Select these search words and let them be mailed to your email address. By clicking on a search word you will immediately get more suggestions for this search word.

5. Automatically finding huge amounts of Long-Tail search words?

If you are setting up a campaign for a webshop with many different products, the amount of Long-Tail search words can get gigantical. It is almost impossible to build a campaign by hand. In this case you can use a tool named "AdwordsRobot". This tool will automatically go through all steps in this blogtext and simplify setting up big campaigns with many Long-Tail search words. This will save time, gives you a better quality campaign and helps you keep your overview. You can also make adjustments to a big campaign fast and easily.