Keyword Research - The 5 Golden Rules
Keyword research is the foundation of any Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. After setting out a target, budget and focus for the campaigns, the keyword research is when an advertiser sets out which terms their ads will appear for. And just as importantly, the terms that the ads will not appear for.
The focus of a campaign is important to maintain, to ensure consistency of budget, ad impressions and therefore ROI. These thoughts need to be carried across in to every stage of the campaign build.
1. Start Generic - When starting the initial keyword research the first “seed word” needs to be generic to the campaign subject. This will give ideas for common themes within the subject. Taking furniture as an example seed word would return keywords such as bedroom furniture, living room furniture, oak furniture. These could form the basics of the ad groups or even negative keywords.
2. Be thorough – Each keyword added to the list needs to be re-entered to the keyword tool you are using and drilled down further. This interrogation needs to continue until no other variants can be found.
3. Manually check – Download the selected keyword list and run through, checking and adding further variants, plurals and phrase combinations.
4. Use more than one source – While the Google Keyword Tool is one of the simplest to use there are many more options available. MSN and Yahoo both provide useful tools that could provide a few more vital keywords.
5. If it’s not in, It’s Out! – Stay to your to the campaign focus and target and if the tool returns keywords that are not relevant to your business, add those keywords as negative keywords. The ads need to appear for the most relevant searches, the search terms you specify. The rule to apply is if it not a keyword it should be used as a negative keyword.
For both Google and MSN PPC campaigns, better performance and cost per click (CPC) can be earned with good keyword research. Sponsored links returned for an exact match are almost guaranteed to perform at a lower CPC than those appearing for broad or expanded match terms.
