How To Choose The Right Keywords For Your Ads

Keyword research is the foundation of a successful PPC Ad campaign. Since the aim of this digital advertising strategy is to increase clicks and conversions, it’s extremely important to choose the right keywords to bid on. However, it’s also necessary to understand that keyword research involves a certain amount of practice and it is also partly an art as well as a science. Today, there are a number of online tools that you can use to determine which keywords would be most beneficial to your ad campaign. You need to understand your target audience and predict the manner in which they type words into the search field on Google and other search engines. That is one of the best ways to make sure that the ads you post show up at the right place and at the right time. When you target prospective customers that are searching for the kinds of services or products your company offers, that improves the effectiveness of your ad campaign. At the end of the day, it all boils down to making the right keyword choices for your ads. Here are some things to keep in view.  

Create A Detailed PPC Keyword List

This should be the starting point of the process. Take a look at the website landing pages that the ads will eventually be linking to. Scan all the text on the webpage and determine which words are the most relevant to the services or products you offer. This should give you a good list of keywords to start out with. You can broadly organize keywords into these categories:

• Generic terms are the ones that relate to the services or products being offered.
• Brand terms are keywords that contain your trademark terms and brand name.
• Related terms are keywords that are not as obvious, but that is still related to the products or services you are selling.
• Competitor terms are essentially the brand names of your competitors that offer services or products that are similar to yours.

Note that bidding on the brand terms your competitors use can be quite expensive. It may not be very feasible to do so especially if you have a very modest budget. On the other hand, if you have a significant amount of money set aside specifically for this purpose, you may want to consider whether the return on investment would be worth your while.  

A Few Tips

When you are brainstorming keywords factor in these aspects too: Always think from the customer’s perspective; the kinds of queries or words that they would use while searching for the services or products you are selling. It’s a good idea to start out with broader terms and then move on to more specific ones. For example Shoes–>Men’s Shoes–>Men’s casual shoes—>Men’s casual leather shoes

• It’s also a good idea to incorporate some synonyms and variations in this keyword list. There are times when search engines do make quick connections between terms that are related- such as “men’s shoes” and “men’s boots”. You can include them if you are deciding to use exact match types. The same rule applies while using plurals, abbreviations, or short forms.
• Long-tail keywords should be included because people are increasingly using voice search while looking for products online. You also benefit from using these long keywords or key phrases because they are less competitive which also makes them less expensive.
• The other way of attracting customers that could be interested in the product you are selling is to include keywords that are related to your service or product. Going back to the same example of men’s shoes. You can consider including keywords such as shoe accessories, shoe cleaner, shoe racks, shoe cabinets etc.
• Consider using a technique referred to as “concatenation”. It can help you expand your keyword list very quickly as it uses various online tools such as Found’s Ultimate PPC Keyword Concatenation Tool, Kombinator, or Merge Words to merge multiple columns of words. In essence, using this technique will help you generate a list of all the possible permutations of the specific keywords or terms that you are aiming to use.
• Keep in mind that people can make spelling mistakes while searching for products and services online. This also means that keyword research should include alternate spellings for specific words, as well as misspelled words.

A word of caution at this point- if you are using DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) in your ad copy, it’s important not to use misspelled words. This will only end up adding that incorrectly spelled word into your ad, making it look very unprofessional. You need to create a separate ad group specifically for misspellings.   These are just some of the ways in which you can choose the right keywords for your ads. For any information about our digital marketing services, feel free to contact YourSocialStrategy.com via this online form and we’ll get back to you shortly.