Pay-Per-Click Keyword Selection – Tips for Beginners
Continuing on from Simon’s latest post “Keyword Research – The most important task to get right from the start”, I will be giving a few tips for conducting Keyword Research in order to select PPC keywords.
This part of the process is absolutely imperative if you want to maximise the potential of your campaign. Choosing the most relevant keywords, with a sufficient amount of volume, combined with a solid account structure is vital to get right from the start as this creates the foundations of a campaign. I will go into more detail about creating a strong account structure in future posts.
Quick definition – keywords are words or phrases that potential customers would use when searching for a product/service. PPC is about bidding on these keywords and showing an advert to the potential customers who are searching for them.
Think Like Your Customers
To begin building a keyword list, think about what the different products/services you offer are at a basic level (look at your website as well). Note these down in an Excel spreadsheet and include variations of industry terms (i.e. PPC, Pay-per-click) and branded keywords if possible as these are known to have higher conversion rates. Next it is time to start thinking like your customers and noting ideas of what they would be likely to search. Be sure to include long-tail phrases (i.e. PPC management services Derby), and ones with commercial intent using such prefixes as buy, purchase, claim etc.
Keyword Generation Tools
Once you have done this initial brainstorming session and have a nice spreadsheet of relevant keywords, it is then the time to move on to a Keyword Tool. The general tool to use is the Google Keyword Tool, which you can find when logged in to your AdWords account. This tool allows you to input all of the keywords that you have already noted down and it will churn out a bunch of related keywords that you can then add to your initial list. However, be sure to scrutinise these ideas and only choose keywords that are completely relevant to your product/service offering.
Relevance is Key
It is important to mention that when building a list of keywords, you do not get carried away and try to build a list of thousands upon thousands. It is about QUALITY not quantity (how many times have you heard that phrase!?), as the best performing keywords will be the ones that are the most relevant to your products/services and directly relate to your website content. You must also remember not to be too general and also not to be too specific. General keywords are often highly competitive and will therefore have a high cost per click of your advert. On the flip side, keywords that are too specific and long-tail may have limited or no search volume if very few people are searching for them.
So, to summarise, it is important to brainstorm basic keyword ideas initially and then expand these ideas by thinking about what your customers may be searching along with using Keyword Tools such as Google’s. Then, it is about filtering out any keywords that are not relevant enough and those that are too general/too specific. However, this post has only discussed simply putting together a list of potential keywords and we must look at search volumes and competition before building a campaign around them…I will be going into this next time when I discuss Account Structure.
Phill (PPC Manager)
