In the last post we went into more detail about Google AdWords and the methods that advertisers can use to get the best from the budget they have allocated for pay per click advertising. This time we shall look at the powerhouse of any AdWords campaign – keywords.
Keywords are the words that a user enters into Google Search, they are the ‘trigger’ for the advertisers advert to show. As they have such a pivotal importance in an AdWords campaign it is imperative that they are carefully selected.
There are a number of ways to research decent keyphrases, Google itself provides some tools to help advertisers. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows users to input keywords and evaluate them for competition and local / global search volumes. Not only that, but the tool will also provide additional suggested keywords to provide the user with even more options. This tool can be a powerful asset for advertisers looking to find keywords for PPC marketing.
Another Google supplied tool is the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. This system takes a different angle to finding keywords, it will actually analyse a specified site and suggest keywords based on its findings.
One tip for advertisers to use is to look at the products they sell and use them as a starting place for the keyword research. After all, the keyword will be separated into specific campaigns and ‘ad groups’ based on the products sold, it pays to find which of those products are searched for most often.
Once the advertiser has a list of keywords that they believe represent the products they are selling it is time to remove any that do not have enough ‘commercial intent’. For an ecommerce site which relies on sales this is an important step, any keywords that are more likely to represent a user simply looking for information on a topic should be removed. Similarly any keywords that are simply far too broad should also be removed, for example – a company selling holidays in Italy shouldn’t be using the keyword ‘Italy’. ‘Italy holidays’ or ‘holidays in Italy’ would be more targeted.
Martin Able is an ecommerce professional with experience in online credit card processing and money transfer services for retail websites.
Looking at the AdWords Keyword Tool, have they ever specified what length of time the data is collected over. For example, it’ll tell me that FirstFound has 1,600 searches, but not if that’s per month, week, picosecond…
Can you shed some light on it?