Three Great Free Tools for Online Marketers

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If you are using Google AdWords to market products online, there are three 'must have' free marketing tools you should be using to save time and generate fantastic results. Without further ado here are the tools.

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool - Let's say you are helping a friend to get traffic to their website. They have a site that sells both new bicycles and bicycle parts. You know from experience that Google AdWords works well for generating targeted traffic who are looking to buy a bike online. Here is a tool that can help you create a huge list of targeted keywords in just a few short minutes. First you need to navigate to the Keyword Suggestion Tool interface. Then simply type a phrase or two into the 'Word or Phrase' input box in the upper left. That's it. Within seconds you will see a laundry list of keyword ideas including the number of monthly searches and how much competition there is (in AdWords) for each phrase. Alternatively, you can find a website that looks to be attracting the type of traffic you want (i.e. your competitor) and type their website address into the search box labeled 'Website'. The tool will scan the website, then glean the major search terms appearing on the site, and use those terms to conduct your final keyword list and generate a huge keyword list. Note that you can sort the results by clicking on any column heading. Most marketers sort the results by the 'Global Monthly Searches' column.

Google Trends - Which gets more searches in the United States - 'bike parts' or 'bicycle parts' - plus what about other countries? There are countless times when an online marketer needs to know the absolute best way to phrase a term to get maximum traction. Think about creating title tags for your pages or buying advertising online through search terms - like Google AdWords. Frequently a marketer has narrowed the selection down to just a couple of phrases but now has to select the final one for publication. There is a fantastic tool from Google which will tell you at a glance which term gets more searches each month in any number of popular countries. The tool is called 'Google Trends'. Here is how you can use it. Let's say that you have narrowed down your search selection to the terms previously listed: bike parts or bicycle parts. Simply navigate to: www.google.com/trends and type in your various selections separated by a colon for each phrase. For our bicycle searches the results are displayed here. You can also easily see the local areas where these searches are most popular (Denver, Colorado) and compare search volumes in different languages.

AdWords Keyword Wrapper Tool - Anyone who has used Google AdWords much has come across the following dilemma: you have along list of search terms that are' broad match' and you would prefer that the terms be 'exact match' terms. If you aren't familiar with the difference between the matching options in AdWords you can refer to Google's AdWords matching tutorial. To change a term from broad match to exact match one needs to add brackets around the term. For example to make the phrase 'bicycle parts' into an exact match term one would need to list it in AdWords as: [bicycle parts]. In the past one could copy all the search terms into a spreadsheet and then painstakingly go through each term one at a time and add the brackets manually. This great tool was introduced to me by my good friends over at WordPress hosting company 34SP.com. The AdWords Wrapper Tool takes a list of general terms without the brackets and then adds the brackets in one pass - potentially saving hours of work. The tool can also generate phrase match or negative match lists as well. The tool is simple to use: just input your list into the input box and hit the 'Wrap AdWords' button. In seconds you will have you list of exact match terms.

Good luck with your online marketing efforts. I hope that these three free tools will save you time and money - and make your campaigns even more successful.