How Do I Choose PPC Keywords?

PPC Keywords

PPC Campaign Success

Perhaps the single most important factor to your PPC campaign success is choosing the right keywords. After all, if you have the wrong keywords, people are not going to see your ad; or worse, the wrong people will see your ad and you’ll end up paying for clicks but won’t have a good number of conversions to show for it.

Time and effort should be put into determining what keywords and phrases your target market is searching for. The more people search your keyword, the more your ad will be seen. And if users believe that your ad is relevant to them, it is more likely that they will click on it.

Secondly, you have to consider that unlike SEO marketing which can have a variety of purposes (such as to educate, inform, engage, etc.) PPC advertising tends to have one main purpose – to sell. Therefore, the keywords and phrases that you use should be ones that are likely to be searched by people who are looking to buy.

Start by creating a list of keywords that your potential customers might be searching. A good place to start is your own website. Assuming that it has already been search engine optimized, your website should already be full of relevant keywords.

Keywords may include generic terms like “running shoes” or specific terms like “Nike” or “Adidas”. You may even choose to use competitor terms – i.e. the names of competitors who are offering similar services or products.

And because people often don’t have perfect spelling or typing skills, you may even want to include words that are relevant in common misspellings. Note however, that more and more search engines are correcting these mistakes, which may make these words less profitable.

You likely already have a fairly good sense of what keywords your prospective clients are searching. Still however, there are a number of online tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner that can either help you verify what you already know or save you a lot of time and effort by helping you find the correct keywords.

If you are looking to sell something in your PPC campaign, you need to use keywords or phrases with “commercial intent” over keywords that tend to be more informational. For example, using “wicker patio furniture” will generate more results in sales than something link “what is wicker?”

Finally, because of the detailed testing you are able to do with PPC advertising, there is no excuse not to be testing your keywords on a regular basis. Although researching keywords is important, most businesses go through a period of trial and error as well.

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