Do Your Keyword Research Like A BOSS - PPC Back to Basics

How To Choose The Right Keywords For Your PPC Campaign

Welcome to the second in my blog series of "PPC Going Back to Basics". Each week I'll be featuring a new blog post on pay per click advertising for beginners. My second blog post is about choosing the right keywords for your PPC campaign.

Every successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign starts with EPIC keyword research because these keywords are the difference between website users clicking on yours or your competitor’s advert.

Moz defines keywords as “words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, otherwise known as "search queries." These keywords allow your business to bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches for a keyword that is related to your business offering.

Steps for doing your keyword research like a BOSS!

• Come up with a shopping list of between 5- 10 important topics related to your business and the landing page the paid adverts will be linking to. For example, In the instance of a fashion retailer, this could be something along the lines of; "Summer wardrobe, holiday outfit, little black dress, going out, winter coats". 

• Now you’ve come up with your shopping list of topics, Time to add the ingredients by assigning keywords/phrases to each topic. So, if I take the topic “Summer clothes”, the phrases and keywords I  come up with and need to a mixture of both; brand terms, generic terms, related terms, competitor terms and long tail keywords:

o   Brand terms- Nicola Digital Wonderland Summer essentials

o   Generic terms - Get the perfect summer wardrobe

o   Competitor terms- ASOS Revamp my summer wardrobe

o   Related Search terms -  Women’s summer shoes

o   Long tail keywords – women’s summer maxi dress

If you need help creating your keywords/phrases, try the free tool Google Correlate.

TIP – Are you stuck for ideas, put some potential search terms into Google and see what comes up.

• Now you’ve got your list of keywords and phrases, use tools such as Google Trends,  Google Keyword planner and ubersuggest to understand typical search volumes and decide which keywords you are going to keep.

Negative keywords

Don't forget, you’ll need to ensure you come up with a list of negative keywords, which reflect the terms you do not want your paid adverts to appear alongside. e.g. in the instance of “Summer Wardrobe”, one of the negative words I would pick is “wardrobes”, because I do not want my advert to appear in search terms for people looking for wardrobes.

Conclusions

When completing your research, the key is to keep going and regularly complete your keyword research because nothing stays static and it will help you keep on top of your search terms.

Hope you’ve found this blog post helpful and look out for my next post on how to create a Google Adwords campaign.