Does your online marketing require you to have a long list of top notch keywords? For most every form of online advertising the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. There are many tools you can use to perform your keyword research and one of the best one (and it’s free) is the Google keyword research tool. Google is king of the search engines and with all that traffic you know that they have a handle on what words and phrases people are searching for online.

You can leverage their knowledge and use it to your own benefit. By using their keyword tool to target a great list of keywords you’ll be ready for whatever type of online marketing campaign you’re planning on running. Whether you do pay per click, search engine optimization, article marketing or a combination of all of them, having access to such an intuitive keyword tool can make your online marketing life a lot easier.

Of course, it’s generally not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket or to depend on online statistics too heavily. When you do a search using this keyword tool you can set it up to provide you with a lot of information. You can get the number of monthly searches, an estimate of how much a certain keyword will cost per click if you’re running a pay per click campaign, as well as an estimate of how many competitors you’ll face in any given niche.

All these statistics will offer you only general estimates so don’t set up your campaigns and expect it all to go according to the estimates. If you find a great keyword that you want to use and the keyword tool says that the average cost per click is $1.34 you have to be aware that your actual cost could be higher or lower. Don’t get too caught up in the estimates.

The actual amount you’ll pay per click will depend on many variables. One of these variables is the quality score your ad has been given by Google. The quality score is based on many things, one of them is your click through rate (the number of times your ad is clicked on in comparison to how many times it’s shown).

The more targeted your ad is to your keyword the more clicks you’ll get, or at least that is the way Google looks at it. If two competitors are each bidding on the same keyword, the one who has the highest quality score will get charged less for that keyword than their competitor.

The way Google looks at it, a high click through rate is kind of like an endorsement that your ad is relevant and on target. The searchers like it so Google likes it.

When it comes to using the free Google keyword research tool just be careful that you don’t get too caught up in the numbers. The average cost per click and the average monthly searches are just to give you an overall idea of if the keyword is viable or not, these numbers are not written in stone.