Finding the right keywords for your PPC campaigns: advice from our PPC management service team
PPC campaigns can be a great way to gain traffic to your website and generate leads. It’s a fast paced part of digital marketing as any changes you make can have an immediate effect on the performance of your campaigns. As a Dorset agency offering a PPC management service, we know great PPC campaigns will be centred around carefully selected keywords.
But with an estimated 171,146 words currently in use in the English language*, how do you find the keywords that will get your campaign shown to the right people? In this article we share the best way to find the perfect keywords for your campaigns.
Start with what you already know
No-one knows your business better than you, not even the internet so start with your own brain.
Create a comprehensive list of words and phrases that someone might use to search for your product or service.
You can start off with general search terms, but try to drill down to specific words that relate to what you offer. The more niche, the better. And there are no silly words or phrases at this stage. You just want to make a big list, so put everything down.
Move on to using keyword tools
As a PPC management service, we have found that it is a good idea to use a few tools to find out what people are searching for to get to your website.
Google Search Console
If you have Google Analytics set up, you can use Google Search Console to discover what words and phrases were used to find your site. Bear in mind when doing this though, that Google Search Console won’t show you every phrase that has led traffic to your site, but it will give you an accurate idea of what is being used to find your website.
Customer Data
The other tool is customer data. Do you have any recent surveys that might give you a clue into what words and phrases your customers use when referring to your products or services?
Try to put yourself into your customers shoes, this might seem like common sense and you might feel like you have already done just that, but by consciously shifting your thought process to be from the perspective of your customers, you will unlock a whole load of words and phrases.
Google Keyword Tool
Google’s Keyword Tool is also a great tool to use. Google wants you to spend your money with them, and they know that the way they can get you to do that is through helping you get a good return on investment (ROI). So, they have created this tool to help you produce well performing ads.
The tool can be found in your Google Ads account, under settings and Keyword Planner. The Keyword Planner is a great way to find any keywords or phrases that you might have missed when creating the list yourself. You will also find any common spelling mistakes that are made when searching for your product/service and any unexpected phrases that lead traffic to your website. This tool also shows the search volume for each word/phrase and the competition difficulty, helping you to pick out the best keywords for your campaign.
Top Tip: Take it from our experienced PPC management service team, relevancy is the number one priority when going through the list of keywords. The more relevant the words, the better your campaign will do.
Take words from your landing pages
The relevancy of the landing page you are driving traffic to, will impact how well your adverts do and affect your overall ‘quality score’. To ensure your ads do well, you need to make sure that the keywords on the pages match the keywords that you have based your PPC adverts on.
Scan through the content on your landing page, and pull out the keywords that you use consistently throughout the page.
Part of our PPC management service is going through and optimising landing pages, so that campaigns can perform to the best of their ability. If you are looking for some help with this, get in touch by calling us on 01202 888200.
Create long tail keywords from generic ones
What are long tail keywords?
A long tail keyword is usually a key phrase that is more specific than just the key word. Because they are more specific they are longer than your keyword. Using a long tail keyword or phrase allows you to find a more specific audience, who are likely to have more intent behind their search.’
While long tail keywords may not have a high search volume, the internet behind them is much stronger. It is likely that someone searching a long tail keyword has the intention of purchasing the product or service being searched for. Therefore they are likely to click on your ad and convert to a customer.
If you have a long tail keyword in your PPC campaign you can ensure that you show up for that search, which is likely to lead to a conversion as your advert is exactly what the searcher is looking for.
A bonus is that long tail keywords are often less competitive, meaning they cost less to bid on.
Organise your keywords
By now you should have a keyword list as long as your arm. But you can’t use all of them … that would be quite chaotic. From here, you need to start grouping them together; take targeted words that are related to each other and create a group.
These groups will dictate your ad groups, while fishing out any random keywords that may not be that relevant to your product or service.
This will also help you to start creating a negative keyword list, which will ensure that your adverts don’t show up for irrelevant keywords.
Keeping reviewing your keyword list
A keyword list, and a negative word list, are not something you complete and then leave. You will find that there are search terms you didn’t think of, despite all your research, when you set up your campaign, so keep adding and reviewing your keywords. By doing this, you are narrowing down the searches that your adverts show up for, therefore showing for more relevant and intent lead searches, which will lead to more conversions.
Similarly, you will find that you show up for terms that aren’t relevant to your business, and aren’t getting you any leads or conversions. To stop this happening, you need to continue adding words and phrases to your negative word list.
If you are short of time, and struggle to fit in PPC check into your weekly schedule, this is something our PPC management service team can do.
How can we help?
CW Marketing offers a PPC management service. As an all inclusive service, we can help you set up your keyword lists, separate them out into ad groups, and write ads that utilise your keywords. Once the campaigns are all set up, we will then maintain the campaigns and keyword lists for you.
If you think you could benefit from our PPC management service, call us today on 01202 888200 to discuss your needs and questions. Alternatively, you can fill out our contact form to find out how we could help you.