Keyword Research Tips For Adword Campaigns

byRobert-A

10.9K followers

Updated 8 years ago

Hello folks. I’ve had a couple of questions from new members on Adwords this week so although I'm no expert here’s my take on this method of promoting your website and the products/services you have on it.

As you know probably Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing system, which is a really great way to get traffic to your website site. But unless you know the intricacies, it can end up costing you a lot of money.

So, what's the main element to success with AdWords? Well, I wish I could tell you there are simple ways you can achieve success, but the simple truth is, the ultimate way to ensure success with AdWords is usually to be familiar with every part of the program. This could take you weeks of research, plus extra cash to try out with a genuine AdWords account. However, you can greatly boost your chances by a little bit of advice: don't skimp on your keyword research!

Maybe you believe the best and quickest way is to go through your site, get 20 or 30 phrases or words, insert them into an Ad group, and you could sit back and wait for the traffic and sales that come in. This is simply not the case. Keyword research should be the most important part of establishing any campaign; not just that, you should be carrying it out all the time. That’s right - never stop building your keyword list. Okay, now I want to clarify a couple of things:

First, you must understand how Google uses your keywords showing your advertising. You place a bid that can determine your maximum cost per click (CPC) for every single keyword. This is different for each and every single keyword. This bid will not represent the total amount you'll pay for every single click; this is merely the utmost you'll ever pay for any one click. For instance, if you have a maximum CPC of $0.50 place for a keyword, you'll simply pay the entire amount if another person bids $0.49. If someone else decides to lessen their bid to $0.30, you'll pay just $0.31. It’s because Google's bid discounter only charges you one cent more than another highest bidder, whatever your potential CPC is. Theoretically, then, you may bid $10 or even $100 but still pay just $0.31 for a click.

But that isn't all! While you start to get impressions (i.e., your advertisement turns up in the SERP's) and clicks, you will have a click-through rate (CTR). This signifies the amount of clicks you obtain per 100 impressions. Here's the truly beautiful thing about AdWords: the higher your CTR, the lower your click cost. Because Google values relevance, you'll get a bonus offer for having another relevant Ad, and CTR is the primary indicator of how relevant your Ad is.

So, let's say you're competing with someone for Ad position No 3 on the SERP's page for a specific keyword. Your potential bid is $0.50 and their bid is $1. They should be way above you, right? Definitely not. Assume you have a CTR of 5%, and theirs is merely 1%. Google factors in CTR when determining Ad positions, which means you end up with this: utmost CPC x CTR = (what we'll call) ranking factor. In this case, your ranking factor is 0.025, while your competitor's is merely 0.01. This means your Ad shows above theirs for $0.50, even though they are prepared to pay up to $1.

Okay, so now the fundamentals are known by you of how keywords work in AdWords and exactly how Google charges you for clicks. What's next? Keyword Research! The ultimate way to start this is by using a keyword tool. I personally use WordTracker (https://www.wordtracker.com/) quite a lot. I will not get really specific about how precisely WordTracker works, because they have got a huge amount of information there on the website - just go do some reading there after reading this blog. Simply put, WordTracker can help you find very good keywords to use in your AdWords campaign.

You type in any word, and you'll get up to 300 related terms, which you are able to then select to discover a few hundred variations of this term. The terms you'll get are all terms from WordTracker's search query database, which uses metacrawlers to compile information (again, they explain it on their site if you're really interested). So you know that all the words you find there are real terms that people are actually searching for. Even better, you get a prediction of how many searches to expect per day for any keyword, how many times it shows up in their database, and a Keyword Effectiveness Index value, which you can also read about on the site. You can get a free trial, or you can sign up for a single day to test it out with all the features included (a day's membership is just a few dollars).

There are a few other free key word research tools you may use, but I would only recommend these and limit to absolute newcomers who've no budget to get started on out with, but there is a catch:

If you are marketing with Google AdWords, you have to know that Google makes up about at least double as many queries as Yahoo!, in a few instances 3 or 4 times as much. Reports vary, Google usually gets credit for approximately 50 to 60% of most searches, while Yahoo! gets about 20 to 30% - but this is dependant on all searches, and results for individual searches may vary widely.

You might find other "free" tools or downloadable programs that claim to help you with keyword research, but I wouldn’t work with them. You get what you pay for.

But third-party tools, even if they're very good, won't do your keyword research for you. You'll have to pick through your web site for words and phrases that you can use. Then, using those words, see if you can think of similar words or concepts that people might be searching for. There's no real trick to this; you've just got to do a lot of brainstorming. Once you have acquired a good core list, take that to WordTracker or whatever Keyword Tool you use to beef it up. In the event that you see any words that don't relate with your product, niche or service, add them as negative fits. Remember what you believe to be your best keyword mught not bring you the most visitors. As the graphic below shows, second choice keywords can sometimes outdo your Main keyword, so think carefully before you put your keywords into your campaigns.

Now you should have a short but healthy keyword list. This is your first step to beating your competition on Google AdWords.

There you have it people, my take on Adwords if any of you are interested in getting a few campaigns up and running.

If any of you already have campaigns then let us all know how you’re doing with a comment below.

Enjoy your day or evening wherever you are.

Robert Allan