It’s All About the Keywords

When it comes to choosing the keywords you use in your campaigns, you can just scribble down a list of all of the keywords and phrases you can think of, dump them all into your PPC account, write ads for each one, and then see which sink or swim…but that isn’t very time or cost effective.

Eventually, you will be able to determine what works and what doesn’t that way, but in the process, you will spend a lot of money and take up a lot of time that you wouldn’t have to do otherwise.

So instead of approaching the keyword selection for your PPC campaigns all willynilly like that, I advise using a much more efficient and methodical way. You will get better results in a lot less time, without wasting your PPC budget on 500 clicks that didn’t make you a sale.

The first thing to do is brainstorm. If you were searching for your niche or products, what would you search for? Make a small list of those. While you’re doing that, bear in mind that you want to think like a visitor. Since you’ve chosen a niche that you are very familiar with, you may be used to thinking in jargon or industry terms that the average visitor may not know about. While it’s fine to include those, make sure you think in terms that the uninitiated may think in. If you aren’t sure if you’re coming up with the right things, ask friends or family what they would pop into Google if they were looking for the products you are going to promote. If they differ from what you’ve got, write them down.

Then take that list over to a keyword suggestion tool, like we used earlier when picking our niche. Plug the list in there, one by one, and see what comes up.

From those results, start compiling a new list.

How long you make this new list is up to you, but it doesn’t hurt to make this list as exhaustive as possible, so you don’t rule anything out unnecessarily. Just avoid any of the results that don’t deal with what you are doing, even if they contain your keywords. You want a list of RELEVANT keywords and phrases to work from, or you will be paying for clicks that will not do you any good whatsoever. And that’s a waste of time and money.

Put the high volume keywords (the ones that usually appear at the top of the results pages and indicate they have more people searching for them) at the beginning of the list, or mark them in some way so you know what they are, and put the lower volume keywords lower down on the list.

This will help you determine later which clicks are worth your budget and which aren’t – though, of course, the larger the budget, the longer the list can be, and can include those lower volume keywords and phrases.

If you want to see how your keywords are stacking up against the competition AND maybe get some more ideas for your own list, you can spy on the people bidding on keywords in your niche using a special spy tool. There’s a great one in the toolbox over at ShoeMoney that I highly recommend, and it will also let you get an idea of what people are paying for their keywords.

With this larger list, it’s time to start grouping them. You want to take all of the different keywords and phrases that are closely related and group them together. You will be writing an ad per group, so you want them to be as closely related as possible, even if that means you only have two or three terms per group.

Once everything is grouped together as much as possible, then you expand them.

Think of as many different variations as you can for each term, and write those down in their respective groups. Think of common ways people might type out your words. A word that is normally a compound word can be broken up into two words, for example, or you can make them plural. You can also add words like “compare,” or “buy,” to the terms, because that will bring some really specific and targeted traffic your way – people that are already looking to buy what you are promoting.

To be even more thorough, you can run them through what’s called an automated keyword transformer program (there’s a free one here that you can download).

This will produce even more versions that you can use and is particularly useful for coming up with the three different “match types” for each of the keywords you already have if you are using Google AdWords as your engine. It effectively triples your keyword pool for AdWords ads.

The AdWords match types are called “broad,” “phrase,” and “exact.” Broad matches are the default option in AdWords and will allow your ad to display for many different variations of your keyword or phrase. For instance, if your keyword is “plasma television,” your ad would be eligible to appear whenever anyone searches for either or both “plasma” and “television.” Your ad would also be eligible if people search for plurals, synonyms, and perhaps other variations, depending.

Phrase match means your ad will show whenever someone types that phrase in, “plasma television,” with the words in that order, and you get that match type by entering your keyword into AdWords inside quotation marks. Your ad may also display if the visitor has other words surrounding the phrase, but not always.

Exact match is exactly what it sounds like – your ad will display when the visitor searches for your exact term, without any other terms included. You denote an exact match keyword in AdWords by surrounding it with brackets like this:

[plasma television].

Once you have done all of this, you will have a nice long list of keywords that you can use to build your ads around.