Here’s a fun test to try. Pick ten friends, show them a picture of a product like a big screen TV or cell phone, and ask them what they would type into Google to buy it online. You’ll be amazed at the variety of answers. Some will search by brand name, others by size, still others by price. This shows you how many different ways consumers will search for the same item.

Keyword choices are affected by so many things – age, ethnicity, birth place, income, etc. That’s why it is impossible for one person to try to guess all of the potential keywords consumers may use to search for a product – each of them has the same list of factors affecting their keyword choices. But there are ways to overcome this issue.

Each of the major search engines offers free keyword selector tools to help you build your list. They’ve spent a great deal of money analyzing terms to offer potential advertisers more keywords, which could in turn lead to more clicks and revenue. Each time I look over one of those lists, I literally say “Wow, I never thought of that!” Truth be told, you will too!

A few words of caution, though: Don’t look at each list as the definitive resource on the topic, and make sure that you watch your results very closely. I’ve had both great successes and great failures with those lists, and I deleted the failures before they cost me too much money, and used the successes in the other search engines.

I’ll talk about paid keyword sources in a later post.