Your keyword lists are the root of a good PPC campaign. You
should properly research and source quality keywords. Create a
good long list. Go deep and go wide, by this I mean investigate
every avenue and every avenue off every avenue etc.
Here’s a quick example of how to expand your lists by
investigating related avenues. In this example I’ll use mortgage
as the base keyword.
Mortgage is a very competitive keyword on the Net simply because
the commissions are so high. So how do you break into the market
without paying over the odds?
Create your first list and think of different ways your prospect
could interpret mortgage e.g. buy house, bad credit mortgage,
best loan, house purchase finance, no status loan, home finance,
etc. This really is only slightly removed from the base keyword,
you should dig deeper still.
Next try expanding into types of mortgage – flexible, interest
only etc. take these and mix them up with your first list, as
you do this you’ll find avenues of keyword groups present
themselves from single keywords e.g. interest only house loan,
flexible home finance etc.
You could create an Ad group focused entirely on mortgage
company names take that further still and add a .com to the name
or a co.uk or your own country extension e.g.
www.somemortgagecompany.com.au It doesn’t matter if this domain
doesn’t exist, people type things like this into a search engine
so it’s possible you can pick up low cost traffic with these
keywords.
Avoid the general keywords and dig a little deeper to expand on
related terms or, here’s a good one, rephrase those terms e.g.
turn cheap mortgage around and use mortgage cheap too. Put
yourself in your prospects shoes. What would they search for?
How would they type it into Google? People don’t always type a
search phrase in a logical order.
For some quick avenues to explore check out these keyword
goldmines -
Plurals, domain names, serial numbers, product numbers, spelling
errors, no spaces between the phrase words e.g. buywidget. Add
..com or .net or .info etc, company names, company domain names,
domain names and variations e.g. mydomain.com www.mydomain etc.
Add superlatives e.g. best, cheap, cheapest, best buy.
Competition site names, foreign words, US or UK spelling,
product names, typo’s, hyphens instead of spaces.
Be sure to separate out all these keywords in to different
lists. You should be setting up different Ad groups for each.
It’s important to not just drop them all into one campaign
together. Instead place all the typos in one Ad group all the
plurals in another and so on. This will make for easietr
targeting of your ad writing depending on your Ad groups
keywords. Plus tracking results will be simpler.
Another great source for keywords are your site Log files
trhey’ll tell you exactly what keyphrase has been used to find
your site by a visitor.
Search for your main keywords on the search engines and see what
related terms pop up. Check the meta tags on your competitors
site. Check the copy on your competitors site.
Do you see were this is going. I trust that gives you an idea of
the power of going deep and wide on your keyword list building.
Remember this is the first building block on which to lay down
your PPC management.
Darren Yates
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/ppc-management-starts-with-a-great-keyword-list-2137.html
Posted in Keyword Research
