Expand Your Keyword List for Free: How the New WordStream Keyword Tool Works

Whenever a new PPC tool is released, we try to do a quick review to let you know how it works and if it would be beneficial for your PPC campaign. Today, I’m going to explore the new Free Keyword Tool from WordStream. Overall, the tool is quite easy to use. Even upon your arrival to the site, your greeted with straightforward, uncomplicated instructions and user interface. As you can see, all you need to do to get started is insert a keyword. Pretty simple.

The next step in the keyword research process is also easy to navigate. There are three columns to look for in this screen shot below. First, you can add additional keywords on the upper left side within the “List Keywords” box. This way, you can add different terms to your initial list. On the bottom are the results of your keyword search. The free tool provides the top 100 matches. These matches can be sorted by relative volume. Also, on the upper right, you can add ‘related keywords’ to your results as well. The related field is useful because these can be different keyword groups or categories that you can explore outside of your original keyword scope.

You can email the list when you’re done. Before you email your keyword list, you should spend time refining your list by removing irrelevant terms as well as adding and exploring the related terms. When you choose to email the list, it will be sent to you via linked Zip file. Pretty easy to use and understand.

Also, you’ll notice the gray box on the bottom left side of the screen that reads, “Click to copy keywords.” This is also a helpful way to snag your keywords. This button will automatically copy the keywords within your results. Be mindful, when you click the button, nothing visible actually happens. I was a slightly confused as at first. So, I clicked the button and nothing happened. However, I clicked again (nothing happened) and I opened Excel and hit the paste function – and there are my keywords! Very handy but don’t get confused.

And that’s how the tool works. There is one feature/section that doesn’t appear to function properly – or at least I couldn’t get it to work. On the site you can create free keyword tool account. I filled out the form to open an account; received the account activation email; I clicked on the “click here to activate your free account” link – but I was redirected to the site with no other instructions. I clicked on the link in the email as well as pasted in the URL but nothing happened. So, either the free account set up wasn’t working when I tried (it may be fixed by the time you read this), or I did something wrong. But you don’t have to create a free account to utilize the keyword tool so don’t let this stop you from using it!

When conducting keyword research, you should give the WordStream tool a try. It’s easy to use, it provides pretty good results, and it’s free. And no, I wasn’t paid to say this. Good job guys, and thanks for building a free quality PPC tool.

do some of that social network stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.