Keywords are Absolutely Essential

There is so much to say about keywords, I can’t possibly put it all in one post – they are that important.  Once you’ve fleshed out your goal, you need to dive headfirst into your search for keywords.  Establish the most important keywords for your campaign and use them as the cornerstone of your account; these are the essence from which your ad groups will grow.  Every search is a question and you ought to formulate your search terms in such a way that they present the answers. Here are some key points to keep in mind as you work through keyword development.

First, more is more.  Search everywhere for keywords.  Look through your site/landing page for key terms.  Use keyword generators on SEM Web sites.  Perform searches on each of the search engines and check out related terms.  Get low-tech and use a thesaurus.  Keyword inspiration can come from a number of sources, but when you start researching you want to have too many to fit into your account.  You can whittle them down later, but it’s good to start with a vast number of keywords to figure out the depth and breadth of your ad groups.

Multi string search terms will probably be the core of your best converting terms.  You should have very few single keywords in your account.  Generally speaking, single word keywords are too generic to draw qualified traffic to your site.  Imagine you bid on the keyword “bankruptcy.”  It’s a very expensive keyword in general, but the searches that would bring up your ad could be bankruptcy law, avoiding bankruptcy, life after bankruptcy, bankruptcy counseling, bankruptcy court, or any number of other permutations of the word bankruptcy.  Only a handful of them would probably be relevant to your site, but you could lose a lot of money in wasted clicks from irrelevant sources.  If you specialize in avoiding bankruptcy, then focus in that direction in your keywords. There really is no such thing as being too specific.

After you have your extensive list of keywords, start separating them into your ad groups by category.  Eliminate any keywords that are too generic or irrelevant.  Keep closely related terms in the same ad groups (this helps you when you create your ad copy).  Insert location related terms if you’re using geo-targeting.

As you refine your keywords, you’ll also want to start thinking about negative keywords – which is the next step!