When looking for the best keywords to bid on through Google AdWords you should always know what your competitors are doing to be able to out rank them.
The quick analysis is going over the top 5-10 results for a targeted keyword. So if you have an idea of the keywords you can check out the Google keyword tool. Make sure that you are checking out the competitveness of the particular keywords that you’re going after. Some keywords will cost a ton of money and not bring a ton of results. Make sure that you have goals before you start. Can you justify a $15 per click on that keyword. Below are some of the top keyword look-up tools that I have used that work in the past
- SEOBook
- SEO for Firefox
- SEOmoz’s Plugin
- SpyFu
When you are charging clients you need to make sure that you are calculating this time in. The harder the keywords are in Google to rank for the more time you’re going to have to take to bid and rank for them. Keep in mind also that 42% of the traffic to a page will go to the first ranked ad or first ranked result on the page. If you look at this from a searchers perspective. 60%+ of all traffic during any given search are given to the top three results.
After giving a short quick analysis, you should give your competitors site an in-depth review. You should look at what they are doing for SEO and link building.  Look at their back-link profiles. What are they doing that’s working? What are they doing that is making them money? What are they doing that’s working that you could borrow?
Knowing what ads they are running and what types of keywords they are bidding on will help you know what audience they are considering. Knowing this will help you make more educated decisions and also what you could be doing that they are not doing. You don’t want to invest your time and money into something that’s not going to work. Try using SpyFu to get competitive analysis on what they are doing.
