Keyword research is crucial for your business’ AdWords success. Without strategic keywords you could end up running a fruitless campaign. Here are 10 tips to consider when beginning your keyword research.
So you’re ready to start your first AdWords campaign and want to choose the most effective keywords?
Keyword research is crucial for your business’ AdWords success. Without strategic keywords you could end up running a fruitless campaign. Here are 10 tips to consider when beginning your keyword research:
1. Find out your best selling products and/or most popular services
If you are unsure you can find out through Google Analytics and gain an insight to your most clicked pages on your website. While you would want to test keywords for a range of your products and services, it’s best to first build your keywords around your best sellers. In doing so, you’ll be able to gain higher conversion rates and revenue.
2. Use Google Keyword Planner to gain insight on search volume and competition
Simply search for popular industry related keywords and the Keywords tool will provide you with a whole list of similar keywords and phrases. You’ll be able to get ideas from the results and choose even more specific and popular terms.
3. Suss out your competition
It is always smart to find out who your direct competitors are for popular keywords. Search these keywords in Google and see who shows up! You’ll be able to clearly see which businesses are going for the same keyword and if you will be able to compete with them.
4. Choose keywords that your customers would actually use
Customers usually type specific “long-tail” keywords and brands. For example, “Black Nike Airs Size 9”. Long-tail keywords are generally less expensive than popular industry keywords. If you’re starting out on a low budget long-tail keywords are a good start to get your ad shown for more searches while keeping your costs down.
5. Stay Specific
By using specific phrases you will be able to attract customers who are at the buying end of the customer journey. These are called ‘qualified customers’. While phrases that are specific may have a lower search volume than generic, popular keywords, they will bring in a higher rate of conversions.
6. Use different variations
They’ll be plenty of different terms for your product and services and it’ll be best to include this variety in your keywords list. Some variations could include conversational phrases, synonyms, spelling errors and plurals. Conversational keywords are typically used at the start of a customer journey – who are usually not ready to buy.
7. Local business? Consider also using keywords that include your location
This tip is for those businesses who want to target customers from specific locations, for example; hairdressers in Glen Waverley. This will help you monopolise on specific regions and bring in qualified customers.
8. Use a variety of keyword matching options
The great thing about Google, is that it offers different ways of keyword matching using punctuation, these include broad, phrase and exact match:
a. Broad Match: This is the standard setting in Google search where your keywords will appear in any search that includes them, for example, if someone types ‘dog wash and haircut’ your keywords of ‘dog haircut’ may still appear.
b. Phrase match: This is slightly different to broad match because your ad will only show up for the specific keywords you have and combinations of those same keywords, for example ‘dog wash’, ‘wash dog’.
c. Exact match: This final match type uses brackets to get an exact match for a keyword phrase. This means that your ad will show up only when someone types the same keywords in the same order, for example [dog wash]
Note: There is also the option to use the “broad match modified” keyword matching type. This includes close variations such as plurals, abbreviations, misspellings and acronyms in your keyword matching which using the plus sign, for example +dog +haircuts or +haircut for +dog.
9. Exclude ‘negative’ keywords
This is an important strategy in keyword planning because by removing ‘negative’ keywords you are eliminating the chances of your ad appearing in irrelevant searches and potentially getting useless clicks that will cost you money. For example if you had a dog wash business and only wanted to target that service then you could add ‘how to’ to ensure your ad doesn’t appear for searches like ‘how to wash your dog’.
10. Group keywords by service or product
Find and list similar keywords and create categorised groups for them. This will allow you to keep your AdWords research organised and will ensure you haven’t missed any important keywords.
About Author: Hayley Jennings is one of our digital marketing specialists at Digital Animals and is passionate about helping clients get in front of their competitors and target customers using strategic AdWords campaigns. Digital Animals is a great source of information and has the capability to help you at every step of the online marketing process. Please get in touch, we are happy to answer any questions you may have.