Developing Your Keyword Research in Line with Your Campaign

By Aisling Blake

One of the basic principles behind Search Marketing is the idea that people use search engines to scour the web for products, services and information, and they do this using keywords.  Effective keyword research is therefore vital when it comes to setting up a pay-per-click campaign.  This research continues throughout the life of the campaign to further optimise performance.

Use Keyword Tools to Create Your Keyword List

There are a huge range of tools and methods on the web to help develop a keyword list.  One such tool is powered by Google and you can use this free keyword tool to generate new keyword ideas and variations.  Although this tool doesn’t provide exact figures for traffic volume it will provide an indication as to whether the search volume for a particular keyword was low, medium or high for the previous calendar month.  Another handy piece of information it provides is the level of advertiser competition for each keyword.

This tool will also throw up keyword synonyms, which is a really quick way of expanding your keyword list.  You can tailor your results to specific countries too.  This certainly comes in handy when doing keyword research for multi-country campaigns, as users searching in one market place may behave very differently to users in another.  Therefore, it’s very important to localise your keyword research for maximum results.

It is also important to add keywords to the list that you believe people are searching on to find your product or service.  But always remember to back this up with keywords that are actually being searched on by users or else you’ll find that your traffic volume is very low.

Build Your Keyword List As The Campaign Progresses

Once your campaign is set up using initial keyword research it is important to continue to add more keywords to your list.  This reflects the fact that although many users search using one-word key phrases, many users are beginning to tailor their searches even more.  This results in a long tail of keywords running into thousands for which your site could be found.  It just so happens that these keywords are usually cheaper, so it really pays to concentrate on building this list of key terms that are made up of two keywords and more.

Two really effective ways of doing this is through Google Analytics and Google’s Search Query Performance Report.  Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that can be installed on your website.  Through this software you can see what keywords drove users to your site through the organic or natural listings.  This list of keywords can then be cross-referenced with the list of keywords in your pay-per-click campaign and any relevant keywords that drove users organically to the site and aren’t already in your pay-per-click campaign can be added.

Using Google’s Search Query Performance Report is another great way of expanding your keyword list.  It also, however, can help generate negative keywords to add to your account, thus making visitors even more targeted.  The Search Query Performance Report details keywords that drove users to click on your ad, but that aren’t already in your keyword list. 

For example, you sell all sorts of shoes and by searching on the term ‘high heel shoes’ your ad appears.  However, your ad may also appear for terms such as ‘party shoes’ or ‘wedge shoes’ even though these keywords aren’t in your account.  This is because the term ‘high heel shoes’ uses broad match and will trigger your ad for other queries that include the term ‘shoes’.  As these keywords are also relevant to what you sell you can add them to your keyword list.  Your search query performance report may also tell you that our ad appeared for the term ‘golf shoes’ and someone clicked on your ad.  As you don’t sell any kind of sports shoes you want to filter out these visitors and so you can ad the term ‘golf’ as a negative keyword to your campaign.

Keep Refining

The road to continued pay-per-click campaign success heavily relies on perfecting your keyword list, adding more derivatives of keywords to your account, as well as removing under-performing ones. Don’t forget that negative keywords can also be highly beneficial in removing any unwanted clicks.