Ad Intelligence: Advanced Keyword Research Tool

Recently, I wrote a guest post on my friends blog (WritingToExale.com) about the best SEO practices for creative writers. I have accepted this challenge, despite not being a SEO guru, as I wanted to make a point that regardless of what you write about, SEO is SEO. The only difference is that you have to focus your work based on the topic you have chosen, and most importantly, take action.

Content set aside (that’s a given), one of the most important SEO ranking factor is keyword usage. In this guest post, one of his readers asked, what are the best keyword tools that are available out there? Needless to say that most of the time, what we are looking for are good tools that work, and preferably for free. Google’s AdWords keyword tool, Wordtracker’s keyword suggestion tool, and SEO Book’s suggestion tool, are great tools that you have probably heard of, and are all highly recommend. Today however, I will not be making a list of the best keyword suggestion tools out there (maybe later), but rather talk about one amazing tool, which you might have heard of or not.

Introducing Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence Excel Plugin

Some of you have been asking me how to do SEO for Bing. Well, here’s a tool that can help. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (ex-adCenter Add-in for Excel) is a keyword research and optimization tool that operates inside Microsoft Office Excel 2007. It provides keyword expansion, research, pricing, KPI (keyword performance indicator), and many more, allowing you to maximize the results of your keyword research and analysis. Some of the things you can do with the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool, are:

* Build a lists of suggested keywords and develop informed keyword strategies based on actual Bing and MSN query data, including: relevance, volume, cost history, demographic, and geographic.
* Leverage actual historic and forecasted monthly query and content data to optimize your keyword research based on what users are actually looking for, spending more time on what works and less on what doesn’t.
* Gather information based on pricing data for keyword-specific metrics such as clicks, impressions, position, click-through rate, and cost per click.
* Gather pricing KPIs for specific businesses to determine the monetization potential of a vertical and how well it is performing.
* Change date ranges and other variables for any type of research to query for traffic, keyword categorization, keyword monetization, etc.

here are some examples:
All options (to have an idea)

A general query based on a specific vertical: Business

Keyword suggestions, based on the results of the query above: email marketing

Keyword monetization (specific range including CTR, CPC, Match Type, average clicks, etc):

A URL keyword extraction tool (good to analyze your competition):

And now for the catch. All of these data are available as long as you have a Microsoft AdCenter account. You can set one up for $5 (minimum), which you can use for any campaign in the future. So in a way, it is free. A tool this good can easily be worth a lot of money, and if you are looking for something that goes far beyond just keyword suggestion, this tool is definitely worth the trouble. Download the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Installation Guide here and learn how to start using it.

Additional resources you can read before making your decision (updated since yesterday – pdf format):
Frequently Asked Questions
Ad Intelligence New Feature Guide (complete information about the tool)

Over to you. Do you know of any other free keyword tool that can match the features of this one? Share it with us.