
Keyword research is the heart of any thriving PPC campaign. It involves understanding your clients and using a wide array of tools like Ahrefs, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, SpyFu, and SEMrush to predict the phrases they are likely to use when browsing the web. Through effective keyword research, you can pick high-performing keywords, which can lead to clicks and conversions. In this guide, we will look at 4 reliable ways of identifying the right keyword for your PPC campaign.
1. Find Your Keyword Universe
The first step towards unearthing new keyword opportunities for your PPC campaign is preparing a list of terms that are pertinent to your business and that show that the web user is fascinated by your content. Rely on your intuition, competitor insight; Google suggests data, analytics data, internal search data, any historical information about your customer or your business to prepare your first list of potential keywords.
With the Google Keyword Tool coupled with tools like Keyword Discovery and Woodtracker, you can expand your list and check the relative search capacities of all your prospective keywords. Remember the search volumes given by Google are inaccurate and only important when you want to compare the popularity of one term to another. However, if you’re going to check keywords’ popularity and rates of conversion, a paid search will come in handy.
2. Narrow and Refine Your List
Once you have a list of important keywords, it is appropriate to trim down your list to the most valuable keywords for your PPC campaign. If your campaign is in its early stages, you can narrow your list to only 20 priority keywords. However, if you are managing a campaign for a large corporation with several products and sub-brands, your priority keywords can be over 100.
The type of keywords you choose will depend on your ranking in your respective industry. A large pet company can target a general word like “dog food.” However, a small pet shop in Solana Beach should consider targeting more precise keyword phrases such as dog food in Solana Beach and shift to more competitive words as its online presence grows.
3. Classify Your Priority Keywords
Once your list of priority keywords is ready, you should classify the keywords into sections precise to business goals. That way, it will be easy to prepare reports and understand the performance. You should classify keywords into two broad categories: brand and non-brand. Other categories may range from product type, business group, sub-brands, to keyword based on a particular business goal or client section. Keyword categorization enables you and your team members to understand the effect of SEO on your PPC campaign at a more significant level.
4. Map Your Priority Keywords to Your Preferred Landing Pages
After categorizing your priority keywords, the next step is to map them to the precise pages that they are related to. All optimization efforts for your selected keywords should target these pages. If you encounter a landing page that is only related to one or two of your priority keywords, you can pick a few keywords from your broad list of keyword to boost your optimization activities and target a broad range of long tail permutations.
Building a successful PPC campaign is not a one-day affair. You must spare part of your daily PPC management time to intensive keyword research. If you take keyword research seriously and do it every day, your account will become powerful and more relevant as time goes. You can also outsource a PPC management team to help you realize the highest ROI possible.