Thinking About Keywords for PPC Ads - The Fine Tuning Process
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If you've selected keywords for your web site, you've been through the process of keyword research before. You know that it starts with brainstorming as many candidate keywords as possible. Then you go through a process of elimination to choose the ones that are most relevant. Next you need to research your chosen keywords in the search engines (to check up on the competition). This is where Wordtracker or other keyword research tools can help.
So you may already have a list of keywords that work well for your web site in organic SEO. Fortunately, your goal with organic SEO and with PPC is the same, at least in part: attract visitors to your site. Especially with a PPC campaign, you want to attract visitors that are highly likely to convert. This is why making sure you use relevant keywords is so important.
Let's go back to Parish's example. Some of the advertisers who turned up when she searched on the phrase "unique gift" would have been wiser to invest their money in keywords such as "shaving products" or "electric razors." Perhaps not as many people would have seen the ad, but those who did see it would have been more interested in buying what they had to offer.
Let's take a look at the winning example. "Unique high tech gadget" is a pretty specific keyword. That means it doesn't turn up very much in searches, so it very likely attracts a lot less traffic than the keyword "unique gift." But the traffic is better targeted. Even though it's a very specific keyword, it isn't the specificity of the keyword that attracts visitors as much as the relevance. Someone performing a search on that keyword is very interested in buying (or at least has some very definite ideas about what he or she likes to browse!).
So how do you make sure your keywords are relevant? You need to think like a customer, and to do that you may need help from someone else. You may have your own ideas about what kind of search terms potential customers would use when looking for your product, but are they accurate? Check the tracking you've done on the visitors who came to your site from search engines; find out what searches they performed. Ask your friends what words they would use to describe your offering if they were searching for it in the search engines.
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