Google's Keyword Tool: A One-Time Approach to Keyword ResearchUsing Google’s Keyword Tool can help you build a base keyword list for your PPC campaigns, but it leaves the majority of your potential keywords in the shadows. If you don’t currently have historical site data, the Google Keyword Tool can be a great place to start for free. But once you’ve gathered that initial list, you’re left having to organize everything in an Excel spreadsheet, which becomes increasingly complicated as your keyword list grows.

Keyword research is an incredibly important part of your PPC process, and equally difficult. More importantly, it can’t be viewed as a step, per se, because it’s continuous and iterative. A free keyword tool like the Google Keyword Tool takes a one-time approach to keyword research, which can be very dangerous when you’re paying for and relying on these keywords to bring visitors to your site. Take the pressure off by entrusting WordStream’s keyword management solution to help you.

Google’s Keyword Tool Helps You Get Started, But Not to Keep Going

Let’s say you’re building a brand new website, and you have never tried pay per click marketing before. You don’t have much site traffic, and you just want to get started and try a few things out. The Google Keyword Tool can help you at this bare bones stage of your process, establishing some very general terms surrounding your main target phrases that you’ve come up with, possibly even helping you think of a few outside-of-the-box terms you might not have originally thought of. It also gives you global search data and some other metrics to help you decipher if the keyword is worth using.

But it’s important to remember that the only terms that Google’s Keyword Tool will give you are terms based on ones you type in. This means if you’re off the mark on any of your assumptions for words your site should focus on, the results you get may not be relevant.

This also means that the data given to you surrounding these keywords is based on global search data and advertiser competition, not on the effectiveness of these terms when directly applied to your website.

After this initial phase, using WordStream becomes essential in order to make the most of your PPC efforts. You can import your list of preliminary keywords from Google’s Keyword Tool into WordStream as a starting point.

From here you can get some practice grouping your keywords into a hierarchy and using WordStream’s helpful functions like keyword segmentation and ad group creation.

In order to continue effectively with your PPC campaign, however, it’s best to use WordStream’s functionality to integrate directly with your site’s log files. As traffic comes into your site, WordStream will let you know what keywords users are typing in to find it, helping you to build a keyword list full of long-tail, highly qualified keywords that will guarantee you the best results when used in your PC advertising campaign.

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on the Google Keyword Tool for your PPC Campaign

Don't take our word for it; here's what the Google Keyword Tool has to say about their keyword suggestions: "We cannot guarantee that these keywords will improve your campaign performance." Since Google’s Keyword Tool bases its results on popular keywords from across the globe, instead of personalized keyword searches from your actual site data like WordStream, this leaves the vast majority of keywords that could be useful to you on the sidelines. It also doesn’t offer negative keyword research – a task equally important when narrowing down which words to focus on (or avoid) in your campaign.

Without this helpful functionality, you’re left to create PPC ads with uncertainty, and you’re unable to organize your list in a systematic way. By forfeiting the ability to group your keywords strategically, you’re actually forfeiting the potential for a higher quality score and better search engine rankings. Search engines like Google reward search marketers with tightly knit, effective ad groups, and relying on Google’s Keyword Tool provides you none of this functionality.

Since keyword research and management is a constant process, it becomes impossible to keep up with your growing list in a spreadsheet without making severe sacrifices, thereby letting you slip behind your competition.

WordStream – The Ultimate Keyword Tool

WordStream takes your actual site traffic into consideration, eliminating guesswork and wasted time, and works constantly to build a campaign of keywords that will get you data-based results, rather than uncertainty. WordStream integrates with Google AdWords directly and can use the data you pull from Google’s Keyword Tool as a base to get started with your keyword research and management.

All of your data is presented to you clearly, with the ability to manage and make decisions based on your data from one easy-to-use interface. Keeping everything from keyword research to ad text creation and AdWords deployment in one central hub means easier management of your data, easier collaboration with your team, higher productivity and better results.

If you’d like to reap these benefits in your PPC campaign, whether you’re just starting out or have been working with pay per click advertising for awhile, you can:

Take the Google Keyword Tool A Step Further and Try WordStream today

Learn more about WordStream's keyword management solutions, the best keyword tool alternative to the Google Keyword Tool. To find out how you can leverage WordStream's robust PPC capabilities for your business: