A podcast for those who design, develop and run websites.

Boagworld is the blog of web strategist Paul Boag who lives in the heart of rural Dorset (hence the cows). He produces a weekly podcast with UX consultant Marcus Lillington on building and running websites. They also run the web design agency Headscape.

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Google adwords hint – use overture

Posted in Marketing on: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by Paul Boag

If you are already running a Google Adwords campaign you will know that competing for popular keywords can be an expensive business. The trick is to find keywords that don’t have a lot of competition but how exactly are you supposed to do that?

The problem

One solution is to use Google’s keyword suggestion facility. You can enter in a keyword or phrase such as "web design" and it will return variations that you might want to consider adding to your campaign. The problem with this approach is that this service is available to every Google Adword customer and so a lot of these keywords are already heavily advertised.

The solution

My advise is to use Overture’s suggestion system instead. Overture is Google Adwords main competition and run a very similar service but deliver ads to the likes of Yahoo and MSN. However many advertisers only run ads on Google and so are unaware of the Overture keyword generator. This means that the competition for their keywords on Google isn’t as heavy and so you will pay less per click through. Also Overture has the added advantage of displaying how many searches were completed on the keywords it returns. This gives you an idea of how popular those phrases are.Click here to use the Overture search term suggestion tool

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Worth reading

Here are some recommended reading for those who want more. You can subscribe to these links via Twitter. If you have a suggestion for a link email Paul Stanton.

Produced by Headscape

Boagworld is produced by the web design agency Headscape founded by Marcus, Paul and Chris Scott. Headscape also has a number of other talented guys who blog. Check them out.

Craig Rowe is one of our amazing developers and writes some superb posts on everything from .net to AIR apps.
Ed Merritt is a Headscape designer who's blog contains examples of his work and a number of free Wordpress themes.
Dave McDermid is a Headscape developer who has an excellent blog. He blogs on everything from AJAX to security.
Rob Borley is one of our project managers and blogs regularly on client and project management issues.
Leigh Howells is our multimedia design guru (whatever one of those is). He blogs on a mixture of design and music.

Paul elsewhere

Paul just can't shut up. He publishes regular audioboos, speaks regularly and is addicted to twitter. He also has a personal blog where he shares random thoughts, inspirational articles and stuff he thinks is cool. See the latest below: