The 7 Best Google Adwords Tools

To benefit the most from what Google AdWords has to offer your business you only need to do three things: keyword research, keyword research, keyword research. And if you still have time and energy left over, you’ll want to do some competitive keyword research.

Fortunately, you have a huge array of related resources — at different price points from free to premium — to help make you hugely successful with Google AdWords. And don’t forget what search engine monster Google itself has to offer.

1. SEMRush

Tops on most every expert’s list of Google AdWords resources available to you is this premium service with a 30-day free trial. Instead of giving you relevant keywords worked up from your “seed” keyword, SEMRush helps you track keywords your competitors use that are successfully converting traffic to competing sites. Knowing what your competition ranks for is indispensable when building your strategy for improving your “organic visibility”. Find out what keywords your competition is bidding on, then leverage them organically yourself.

This tool even lets you research the keywords your competitors’ competitors use. It certainly has one of the fullest sets of keyword research tools you’ll find anywhere. Newbies need not apply; the learning curve can be a bit steep.

2. Keyword Tool

As search engine optimisation moves on from exact-matching your “vanity” keyword, you’ll need to construct “long-tail context” around those seed terms you rely on. This is where Keyword Tool comes in, giving you more of these long-tail variants than you get elsewhere. Many of these keywords would never come to light without Keyword Tool. This tool generates keywords for you not just from Google, but from Yahoo! and Bing searches, too — all for free.

It works by using Google’s autocomplete feature together with Ubersuggest’s letter-adding utility to generate an almost incalculable keyword diversity cloud. You can even use the questions this service generates from your seed keyword to create new blog posts for enhancing organic traffic. The free version is enough for newcomers to see gigantic keyword sets for any keyword research effort.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you figure out why your competition ranks so highly so that you can go about outranking them. Simple enough? With data on hundreds of millions of keywords in the U.S. and into the billions when you add in all the other countries they include, this service can easily help you see if you’re getting the best possible coverage. You’ll know the exact keywords your competitors rank for in organic search results — and how much traffic they attract to them. Type in your seed keyword and scroll between several keyword suggestion algorithm choices and you’ll get thousands of ideas for each. Refined filters help you weed out the useless ones.

Ahrefs certainly gives you the most keyword suggestions, especially when it comes to long-tail variations. And it offers unique, and uniquely useful, metrics to add to your competitive edge. The free version really isn’t for serious research; you must pay for the real hands-on trial.

4. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest simply gives you an overview of cost-per-click, seasonality, and volume all in one place — whether you’re optimising for SEO or pay-per-click. Hundreds of suggestions from “head terms” to long-tail phrases are presented to you instantly, with trendlines for volume, season, and your competition. Ubersuggest shows you who’s spending what on PPC. Get a list of your competitors with their ad copy.

With Ubersuggest you can also search Google News and Shopping, not to mention YouTube. Unfortunately, you get no indication of monthly search totals of displayed keywords and no information on keyword search volume or competitiveness.

5. Soovle

Soovle is for you if you like generating keywords — or coming up with a blog post title — by using Google’s own autocomplete feature. This tool gives you all of that functionality, but from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia and Amazon. Bing and YouTube are thrown in for good measure, too. It is essentially a customisable machine bringing you the search suggestion features from several major search engines all on one screen.

Enter keywords, choose your source(s) with a click, then watch as your results change based on sources you pick. Drag and drop keywords for later exploration. Download, print, or email them, too.

6. KWFinder

This loveable utility lets you enter your seed keywords, then select both the country and language you want to target. In addition to returning Google ranking sites for your keywords, it shows you how your specific keyword has trended for the past decade. KwFinder generates exact search volumes for keywords that are near variants to the ones you choose.

The ability to pick from over 40 languages gives you highly localised results. Importing bulk keywords is one of the features that launch this resource into the elite category, combined with its “newbie-friendly” user interface and responsive service. KWFinder is a freemium service with a free version that is almost as helpful as the premium one.

7. Google

Lucky seven on this list is something of a bonus, as it’s jam-packed with all the free services Google itself offers keyword researchers like yourself. Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner is a remarkable resource, pulling as it does directly from Google — the search engine you’ll most likely be targeting when you optimise your site. Google Correlate, often overlooked but extremely powerful, allows you to see what keywords get searched on — with the correlated terms or phrases searchers also frequently try. The Google Autocomplete feature helps you avoid over-optimisation of keywords by showing you all the related variations. Most overlooked of all is the Google Questions feature. Similar to Autocomplete, it generates related search terms, but in question form.

Starting with any of the above aids to mastering your Google Adword placement results will help you optimise your site for online marketing, whether you choose a free service or one you pay for. Deploying these resources in a coordinated fashion, however, will surely grant you that competitive edge you’re seeking.