How to Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool for Domain Names

Watch the full video at:
https://domainsherpa.com/google-adwords-keyword-tool/

If you want to buy keyword rich domain names with the objective to rank the domain name at the top of the results for a search, you will first want to determine if there is enough search volume and interest my users to justify purchasing the domain name. In this video, I will show you how to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine search volume and advertising interest. Stay tuned.

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Here’s your program.

Michael Cyger: In this video, I am going to show you how to determine if domain names you are thinking of buying are good, keyword rich domain names. There are two factors involved in determining the value of a generic, keyword rich domain name. They include search volume, and you can do search volume by either local, United States, or you can pick a country; and two, the average cost per click advertisers are currently paying for that search phrase.

For example, you may be looking at buying a keyword rich domain name, but it may not have any search volume associated with it; thereby making it just a brandable domain name. Brandable, of course, meaning that it has no searches or type-in traffic prior to a company using it for their brand; for their website. Good examples are Google, which was derived from a word – Googl, which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros, or Ebay. It meant nothing before the company used it to brand their company, marketplace, product, or whatever it is.

You may have a good amount of search volume. Maybe something like thirty thousand searches per month. And it may be a product-related domain name, but there may not be enough interest in advertisers paying to advertise with that keyword phrase. So, what we are going to do is help you figure out the ins and outs of search volume and advertiser interest. In this interview, I am going to show you how to navigate these factors. We will also look at and determine the search volume by geography and by platform. So, whether somebody is on a desktop or a mobile platform; and how that factors into the equation. So let’s get started.

The first thing you will want to do is go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. So, go to your browser, type in ‘Google Adwords Keyword Tool’, and the first result will be Adwords.Google.com/O/KeywordTool. You can go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you can begin to use it immediately from this location without signing in; and you can see that I am using an incognito window in Chrome that I am not signed in for. And I would enter the search phrase, like ‘Domain Names’, and I could make various selections. But every time I do a search, I am going to have to type in this annoying CAPTCHA code. So, what I suggest instead is to sign into your Google account. If you do not have a Google account, I suggest you sing up for a free Gmail account, and then visit the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I also suggest that you sign up for an Adwords account, which is going to identify you as an advertiser.

So, there are two reasons why I want you to do this. One, I want you to sign in, or I suggest you sign in, with your Google account and it is going to remove the CAPTCHA codes because Google then knows that you are a real person. Secondly, if you sign up for an Adwords account, not that you need to spend any money – you do not even need to enter a credit card, I do not believe -, but what it allows you to then do is tell Google: “Hey, I might advertise, so I want you to show me what the average cost per click is on this phrase.”

So what I am going to do right here is I am going to find keywords and I am going to type in the phrase ‘Domain Name’. So, let’s say I wanted to advertise Domain Sherpa on Google and try and get click-throughs by buying pay-per-click advertising, and I want to look at ‘Domain Name’ and I want to look at ‘Domain Names’. I am going to type in both in there and I am going to just hit the search button. What it is going to do is it is going to tell me how many searches happen for those phrases. And in this case, it tells me that Domain Name and Domain Names both have high competition. Local monthly searches are five hundred and fifty thousand. So, more people search for the phrase ‘Domain Name’ than ‘Domain Names’. And it also tells me what the approximate cost per click is.

Now, when you sign in and do this, your columns are not going to be the same as mine. And what you need to do is come over here to the Columns, and you can select All Columns or just select the ones that you want. I like to have the Competition because I like to see is there a lot of competition in buying this keyword phrase. I do not do Global Monthly Searches. Let’s say I am selling a widget in the United States – and I know most of my customers are going to come from the United States because it has a high price point and people outside the country are not going to want to pay for shipping. So, Global shows me all of the search volume across the whole world, but I am only interested in the United States. So, if you run a blog that reaches the entire world, you may want to click Global Monthly. Local Monthly is only the option that you select up here for your Advanced Options. And me signing in from the United States, my default is the United States. I can select other countries, exclude countries, and include additional countries.

Add Shared Search Network if you want your advertising to go across other websites that are in the network. And so, you can play around with those and you can read the information about those different options. But basically, it tells me that there is 1.5 Global Monthly Searches on Google per month for Domain Name, and there is about one million for the phrase ‘Domain Names’.

Now, what this is is Broad Search; and you can look up what these terms mean. Broad means the sum of the search volumes for the keyword related grammatical forms, synonyms, and related words. So, they look at a broad match for the keyword phrases that I put in. Exact match is the search volume for that specific keyword and close variants. So, if you know your keyword phrases for the website that you are trying to drive traffic for; and I know that I want Domain Name. I do not want Domain Names. I do not want any additional words attached to those. What I am going to do up here is deselect Broad, select Exact, and select Search again.

And now you can see that there are much fewer searches within the United States for these phrases – eighteen thousand for Domain Name in the United States. And I can see that, across the Google Search Network, which is blogs that may be displaying pay-per-click advertising, how-to pages on Ehow, let’s say, about Domain Names, and things like that, you can see that it is a few magnitudes higher. And the cost per click is an amazing $18.77. So, if registrars like GoDaddy are paying for ads at the top of search results when you go and you type in ‘Domain Name’, you can see exactly how much they are paying. On average, Domain.com and Register.com are paying eighteen dollars per click. And it is an average. Sometimes they pay more; sometimes they pay less. Actually, the ads that are less relevant are probably down lower on the page and they have a higher cost-per-click because they are less relevant. So Google wants to reward those that are displaying advertisements that are relevant to people’s search so that people like the Google experience.

Okay. So, let’s say that you are not in the United States, or let’s say that you are targeting Japan and you want to grow you Japanese portfolio of domain names, or let’s say that you are thinking about launching a new gTLD for Japan and you want to see how much search volume there is in Japan, you can select Japan instead, click Search, scroll down, and you can see there is very little search volume. Three hundred and twenty across the network and two hundred and sixty exact match searches for that word in Japan. Now, Japan might be different because it is not an English-speaking nation. So, let’s say we wanted to go to the United Kingdom and take a look. We could do a search in the UK and see that it is a 9,900 exact match searches in the UK per month on Google for the phrase ‘Domain Name’.

Now, I do not know exactly. I have heard that Google serves about eighty percent of the search queries across the world. I am not sure if that is eighty percent in the United States or eighty percent in the UK. You might want to look at sub-factors related to that. There may be a bigger search engine in a certain country than Google; in which case, Google is only going to share with you the percentage of search volume that they are producing. They only have insights into the ninety-nine hundred searches that happened in whatever month they are showing us here. They do not know about all of their competitors in that area.

Another thing that you may want to take a look at is if you are buying domain names that you know are going to be used on mobile platforms. You can come down here to the ‘Show IDs and Statistics For’, and you can say All Mobile Devices. So let’s say that you are coming out with a business and you are thinking about buying a domain name in the mobile space and you want that domain name only for mobile purchases. You can see the exact phrase ‘Domain Name’ is searched eight hundred and eighty times from mobile platforms in the United Kingdom per month.

And that allows you to make a better educated decision about how much you are willing to spend on the domain. And I do recommend that you check out the Rosener Equation. Andrew Rosener was good enough to come on the Domain Sherpa Show and show his equation for how to value premium generic domain names. And you can come on here and you can read exactly how it is computed. We show you some examples of using the Rosener Equation. We have revisited part of the Rosener Equation, so you will want to watch the video and then also watch the update; and we will have those linked from the articles. But that is your overview for the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and I hope it is helpful.

Thanks for watching.

Watch the full video at:
https://domainsherpa.com/google-adwords-keyword-tool/