Choosing the right keywords is vital to any search marketing campaign. If you target the wrong keywords, it can prove to be costly and if you do not target the right keywords, you’re just simply missing out on a golden opportunity.
You will have different approaches when doing keyword research for PPC and SEO. With PPC, you have the luxury of going after a larger and broader keyword list. It’s common to have a keyword list ranging from a few thousand in upwards to hundreds of thousand.
For SEO keywords – your list will usually be much smaller and more targeted. To rank organically, keywords must appear on the web pages. The more keywords you want to rank, the more pages you’ll need to create to support those keywords.
In this article, I’ll be covering keyword research for PPC.
Many people fall short when researching keywords for PPC. In many cases, they capture only 20% – 30% of possible keywords within their niche. This is where many PPC campaigns fail to make a positive return. The keywords they target are the most common and typically the most expensive. They don’t realize that the 70% – 80% keywords they didn’t target are the keywords that could bring them 50% – 300% ROI.
Understand Your Market
I know this may be a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many people who do not understand their market. This especially holds true when it comes to online. Find out what your top online competitors are doing and what PPC keywords they are targeting. Understand your demographics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mostly U.S. visitors? If so, what states are providing the most visitors? The better you understand your industry, the better your understanding to what keywords to target.
Here are a few tools I’ve found to be quite helpful with market research:
Build Your Keyword List
The initial keyword list you create is very important. Where many people fall short is that they usually target deep keywords before targeting broad terms. Deep keywords are keywords that usually have the main keywords in it. Let’s say we have a site about dogs. We want to target keywords all dog related.
A deep keyword list will look like this:
- dogs
- small dogs
- dog breeds
- dog
- breeding dogs
- guard dogs
- dog names
- dog breeders
- …
A broad keyword list will look like this:
- dogs
- puppies
- kennels
- canine
- house breaking
- german shepards
- border collie
- boston terrier
- bull terrier
- breed profiles
- humane society
- …
As you can see with the broad list, the term “dogs” doesn’t appear with the other terms but they do relate to “dogs”. If you noticed, I have the keyword phrase “humane society” under the broad list. Yes, this is a very broad term and I might be reaching, but this is a term that could convert very well. Here’s a secret, no one really knows unless you try it. This could be one of those “golden terms” that most people tend to miss.
So, create a broad list first. Once you’ve created this list, take these terms and go deep with them. As you can see, this will create a much larger keyword list. In addition to this, utilize misspellings and create a negative keyword list. You’re well on your way to a successful PPC campaign.
