Guess what is common between SEO (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC? Let’s even take broader like SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Internet research, affiliate marketing, contextual advertising, product, niche research, article marketing and even content sites publishing?

I won’t torture you much: it’s a keyword research and optimization.

You’ve probably been told about Wordtracker or Overture and been sold varies good and not-so good keyword-research software programs gazillion times, so right now I’m going to 5 minutes of your time to share a gem.

You probably know about the famous Google keyword research tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

What may not be so obvious to you is that Adsense and content publishers around the globe are actively using this invaluable research tool to estimate the niche market potential, advertisers’ competition, seasonal keyword bid fluctuations and search volume all just to determine the best keywords for:

• niche research
• niche demand/supply/potential
• SEO
• projected income

You can even browse through actual advertisers’ bids for any given keyword (or list of keywords) using another “Traffic Estimator” tool inside your Adwords account. It’s clear that as a content publisher you won’t get as much per click, but this information can tell you much about keyword competition, advertising budgets and a general level of market capacity and potential.

It’s like Reverse PPC Engineering for content publishers. The same goes for article marketers and SEOrs.

If you click on the second tab “The Site-Related Keywords”, you will see another dream come true for discovering new keywords, markets and hidden profits.

There you can enter any URL or text and get a “Google-filtered” list of related keywords. I mean keywords that provide any SEMer, SEOer or content optimizer with a targeted list of semantically related niche keywords optimized and hand-picked by the Google itself and given you on a silver platter along with the “good old” cost and ad position estimates as well as search volume and search trends. Use URLs of the top-ranking sites for your market and get exactly what Google considers semantically related keywords.

Pick these niche related keywords and run them though a number of tests in the “Keyword Variations” section, further determining their marketability and potential, depending on what project you are running this research for. As you understand, search engine optimizer and Adsense publisher puts different emphasis on the same keywords data.

P.S. If PPC advertising and PPC affiliate marketing is your main profit train, then in a couple of days I will have very exciting news for you and I do mean Very exciting.