Friday, September 11, 2009

Keyword Research and Your Pay Per Click Campaign

By Anthony M. Flores

PPC advertising without proper keyword research is an absolute waste of money and resources. You can easily do this kind of research which will get you well on your way to forming an efficient method for marketing.

What's the purpose of keyword research? Keyword research tells you what people want to search for on the Internet. If you have a Pay per Click campaign, you can put the keywords people enter in the most into your ads. Putting the keywords wherever you can - particularly the article's headline, the text, and even the URL - will help it become more visible to these users. The more instances of these keywords your ad has, the likelier people searching for those things will come across it and go to it. There's a lot more involved in this process.

So while the first element is to mirror what someone is typing in, the second element is to take that list and narrow it down to what keywords to bid on to effectively sell what you have. Now this list may grow, but once you start with a good core list of words, then you can do different variations of that core list. But we need a good starting point and proper keyword research and some common sense will help us build that list.

For example, say you are selling cars. You can go to Google Adwords and find out how many times cars or used cars or used cars for sale or used BMW for sale has been searched. You would truly want to start with a larger sample of words, but for this exercise we will use just these 4 keywords.

Monthly, 151 million people search for 'cars.' That's a lot! It must be the perfect word choice! This is false. You'll waste so much time and money bidding on the rights to put 'cars' in your PPC ad, despite its popularity. What happened? The term is way too general, and have many contexts for searching for it. It won't help a used car business much.

Using that term will get you closer to the best keyword. Even that gets 550,000 searches a month. However it may not be exactly what you want. Again, you should be wondering why. If you only sell BMW cars, then you still need to be more specific. Do you understand what direction we are going now? You need to employ your common sense here. You need to find a list of keywords that is relevant to exactly what your are selling. In this case, 'used bmw for sale,' would be the best choice.

Now repeat this process for all the cities you are potentially selling into, and even get more narrow by typing in a model number of the car like, used 325 bmw for sale in Los Angeles Now you see where were going!

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