I tell everyone that "keyword research is art", and it's true; you can use all sorts of tools and techniques to create your masterpiece, and if you're good enough, live forever off the royalties. The problem with keyword research though, is it's just as easy to create art so abstract that even Picasso would be confused. Microsoft adCenter to the rescue.

Until now, keyword research mostly meant using multiple tools - some online, some offline, some free, some paid - to find, group, then analyze data. So it's hard to learn the art with such little structure in place. But now anyone can do it thanks to adCenter; it oozes organization, features and simplicity like no other keyword tool, plus it's free. I've already raved about it in my Microsoft adCenter review, so now I'm going to show you how to use adCenter to paint beautiful keyword art.

I'm going to save myself some time here too, because I actually need to do some keyword research for a client. So I'll step you through a real-life example of how to use adCenter and give my client the keyword data they need. They're operating in a super-competitive market, so we're trying to uncover some untapped keywords with low competition. This won't take long at all.

Step 1 - Prepare your paints
Before jumping into adCenter, I start with some good old-fashioned internet research - Google style. Google already ranks websites, so it makes sense to use their highest-ranking results to kick-start my research. And it's pretty safe to assume the top 10 Google results are ranking well for good reasons.

A Google search is good, but a Google search from adwordsanywhere.com is even better. Here I can filter my keyword search to a specific country. My client needs "payday loan" keyword data for Australia only, so that's what I'll give them.

So I go to adwordsanywhere.com, type "payday loan" into the search box, select "Australia" as the country (choose "US" if you want the global results), and presto! The highest ranking websites for "payday loan" in Australia.



Here it's not important which websites rank the best - I want to know which keywords are making these websites rank so well. And the very impressive Keyword Extraction tool is about to tell me.


Step 2 - Create a canvas
adCenter's Keyword Extraction pulls the keywords from websites and plants them directly into Excel - how easy is that?



So I copy the top 10 URL addresses from my adwordsanywhere.com search into an Excel spreadsheet. If I want to filter my extraction results (which I do) now is the time to do it. In Options > Keyword Extraction I set the maximum number of keywords returned per URL, and the minimum keyword confidence level; I'm using the "100" and "0.2" settings respectively. These settings dictate how many keywords are returned, so adjust them accordingly. Finally I highlight the ten URLs in my spreadsheet and click "Keyword Extraction".


Step 3 - Clean up
Now I have a canvas to work on, but it's a mess - keyword research always returns some irrelevant, flawed and duplicate data. So it's time to clean up the canvas.


I don't need duplicate keywords, so they're first to go. The easiest way to identify them is to sort the keyword column alphabetically. This groups the duplicates and (impressively) second-level sorts them by confidence level. So I can easily see that I've nine "payday loans", eight "cash advances" and 6 "payday lendings". And because they're also sorted by highest confidence level, I simply delete all except the first instance of the each keyword.



Next on the hit list are all the flawed and irrelevant keywords like "cashnetusa", "public events" and "product photo". Some of these are URLs, some are rubbish, and others just aren't related to my research.


Step 4 - Start painting
I now have a list of relevant keywords that Google is ranking with "payday loan". So next up I use adCenter's Similarity Suggestion function to (you guessed it) suggest similar keywords.

Before running the Similarity function, I'm going to set the options for number of keywords to "50" and the confidence level to "0.2". The Similarity function has a "duplicate control" option, so I'm turning that on too. This saves a heap of time deleting duplicates, and makes me wonder why the Extraction function doesn't have the same option. Does anyone know why that is?




Step 5. Re-clean your canvas
It's a big canvas now with a lot of keywords, so time to do more cleaning. I delete the irrelevant and junk data, then sort the keyword column alphabetically. This gives me a very clear look at the subtle keyword variations that adCenter has produced. You can see by the screenshot the depth of suggestion that adCenter offers, and these results were using conservative search options.




Step 6. Value your art
From here I use the Monthly Traffic function to get some real number values and compare my keywords. I've set the options to 12 months Historic Data, 3 months Forecast Data, and I've activated the display graph to output some visual representation. I highlight my keywords and simply click the "Monthly Traffic" button.

I like to get my hands dirty here too by adding an autosum column to monthly results. It really helps to see the total value and I'm surprised it's not a standard feature. So I insert a column between the historic and forecast data, label it "TOTALS" and use the Excel AUTOSUM function to calculate a total volume figure. I can now sort my TOTALS column descending to display the keywords by highest total volume.


And that's it - job done. It is that easy to do lateral keyword research with Microsoft adCenter. You have plenty of places to go from here, including expanding the topics we've just sourced, and adCenter's great for that too. Right now I'll supply this data to the client and we'll see where they want to go from there.

You can download the free adCenter tool here, and get your $50 in free clicks by signing up here.

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UPDATE: The "$50 worth of clicks free" offer has now ended.
However, you can sometimes get free clicks if you keep an eye on the main page at PayPerClickSearchEngines.com.