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:

1. Google Trends
2. Google Insight
3. Microsoft adCenter Labs
4. Quantcast

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.

Any website owner who cares about ranking well in search engines should utilize what is sometimes referred to as link condoms, or more commonly known as “nofollows” .

Nofollows was originally created by Google to combat the large spam problems that faced many bloggers. Spammers would post irrelevant comments in blog posts with hyperlinks to their websites. This would pass SEO link advantage to their site and eventually provide an increase in search engine rankings.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is assigned to a hyperlink, and provides no SEO link advantage to the destination page. With no apparent SEO advantage to spamming blogs, most spammers simply looked to other areas to game Google’s organic listings. Blog spamming is still being practiced today but since the introduction to nofollows, this type of spam method has dramatically decreased.

Nofollows was made to deter spammers and help reduce altering organic listings, but with it’s existence proved to be quite useful with on-page optimization. This is especially true when applied to a high-level SEO technique called Site Theming. Here, nofollows play a vital role in increasing a theme’s overall topical relevancy.

With Site Theming, the goal is to structure a site in a themed sectional structure. For example, if you have a site about automobiles, you may have a themed section for Ford, Toyota, and Chevy. Within each section, you can find it’s supporting pages. These pages will be topically related to the sections they are in thus supporting the sections overall theme. An example would be a Ford Mustang page would fall under the Ford section. Any supporting pages to the Ford Mustang page would also be under this section.

Now, the idea is to link to pages within the same theme section. All Ford hyperlinks only link to Ford pages. This will provide a high theme weight for each section and could provide a big boost within search engine rankings. Unfortunately, from a usability standpoint, you need to link to other themed sections. By doing this, you will dilute your section’s overall theme weight resulting in lower search rankings. This is where nofollows come in handy.

Using a nofollow on links to unrelated themes will help keep all the link weight within it’s own theme. Like I said earlier, nofollows don’t pass off any link value, it stays within it’s page. You’re simply telling Google, don’t pass off any link love (link value) to this page, just keep the link love to myself.

In this article, I only scratched the surface of Site Theming. It is one of the more complex on-page optimization strategies but when utilized correctly, it can provide a huge boost in organic listings.