How to Choose the Best PPC Keywords? Expert Tips Inside
One huge factor in running successful PPC advertising campaigns is choosing appropriate keywords that one should be bidding for. A proper set of keywords can make all the difference in any campaign. This dictates your click-through rate (CTR)/conversion rate and hence affects your Return on Investment (ROI). In this whole guide, we will take you through the crucial steps to ensure that the keywords you bid on — for your PPC — are going to bring the effect and be very profitable.
Understanding Why Keyword Research Is Important
Mention how important keyword research is before starting keyword selection. Keyword research is the foundation of any PPC campaign, as one can find those very terms and phrases that potential customers use to look for products or services similar to what one has on offer. This is made possible, by so doing, in such a way that ensures targeting for these keywords make the ads appear before the very right people, at the very appropriate time, thus enhancing opportunities to convert the clicks into sales.
Defining Your Campaign Goals
The very first thing in determining what kind of keywords you would want to bid on is to define the goals for the PPC campaign: raising awareness, driving traffic, or driving sales? Most of your campaign objectives greatly factor in later into the decision under the types of keywords to be elected.
Brand Awareness
If you want to create more brand awareness, you will, thus, need to target more popular high-level keywords. These types of keywords cannot be ready to convert, but they will help you to reach a wider audience.
Driving Traffic
For those campaigns that drive users to your website, it will be important that you choose mid-tail keywords: the expressions are not too general, while they still generate substantial traffic. Mid-tail keywords are more specific, and in general, have a higher CTR as compared to general keywords.
Generation of Sales
If you aim to drive sales, use long-tail keywords. These are usually very particular phrases that carry high intent on purchasing. They are less common since they are narrow in focus when compared to short-tail keywords. But they convert better for a higher number of qualified leads.
Keyword Research Tools
First of all, you will need to set up the goals of your campaign; then, look for keywords by using keyword research tools. There are many strong tools that will help you find the right keywords for your PPC campaigns.
Google Keyword Planner
Probably the most renowned tool for PPC keyword research is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. It helps users explore new keywords, discover how they would perform, and work out the average cost per click that each of those keywords may be. From this information, you would find those keywords which balance off the search volume with competition.
SEMrush
Another great place to look at keyword research is SEMrush, which can show you what keywords your competitors are after. In such a case, SEMrush can be used to check who your competitors are, giving you an opportunity to make a bid for keywords that are less competitive.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is particularly good at finding the long-tail keywords that your competition may be missing. If you target these lower competition keywords, you can often achieve far better conversion at a lower cost.
Moz Keyword Explorer
The Keyword Explorer built by Moz is a tool that can be used easily. It offers keyword suggestions depending on your campaign goals and also indicates the difficulty related to the keyword, which helps you prioritize keywords that have less competition.
Analyzing Search Intent
One of the most important factors to consider while deciding the keywords for which one must bid involves understanding the search intent behind keywords. The search intent revolves around the cause of the user’s search using a particular keyword. There are four different types of search intent as mentioned below:
Informational
Users under the category of informational intent may again be seeking answers to some of the questions or might be seeking general information. It is less likely to convert immediately after being triggered, but such keywords are very important because of the ability to brand and send traffic to the information .
Navigational
Users use navigational intent when they are looking to land on your site—be it a brand or a site URL. Bidding on navigational intent is most useful for brand protection in order to have your ad showing up for branded and site-related searches.
Transactional
The transactional intent in the keyword clearly states that a searcher is ready to buy the product. Maintaining and monetizing transactional keywords can really lead to more consumers showing interest in your ad.
Commercial Investigation
These users are in the research phase and have commercial intent. They might be comparing products or reading reviews and looking for the best deals. Bidding on these keywords can be effective in attracting users toward deciding to make a purchase.
Evaluating Keyword Competition
Once you have identified a list of potential keywords, you need to evaluate the competition each of these keywords hold. High competition keywords will be costlier, resulting in a lower ROI. Nevertheless, they are likely to be the keys that have a higher volume of search, hence generating clicks and conversions.
So, how do you assess keyword competition?
Bid Prices
Higher bid prices represent more competition for the keyword. For a high CPC keyword, you might likely target less competitive keywords to optimize the budget scheme.
Ad Quality
The quality of your ads goes a long way in determining whether you can compete for high-competition keywords. You might even get a higher Ad Rank compared to a competitor by a bid that is actually lower solely if your ad copy is so much more relevant and well-crafted to the keyword.
Competitor Analysis
Knowing what your competitors are doing with their PPC can be very instrumental in knowing the best keywords to bid on. If your competitors are bidding on some keyword, then chances are that the keyword has value for your industry.
Considering Keyword Relevance
Another important variable that should be given consideration in the selection of the right keywords to bid on is keyword relevance. A keyword might have a large search volume and a low competition, but if it is not that relevant to the product or the service, it will not bring any useful conversions.
To keep track on keyword relevance, make sure that:
Ad Relevance
Ensure your ads closely match your keywords. If the keyword doesn’t really give an accurate reflection of what the product or service is, then the ad won’t appeal to the users, which again leads to low CTRs and conversion rates.
Landing Page Relevance
The landing page that your users are directed to, after clicking on your ad, must also be relevant to the keyword. Hence you’re likely to waste the ad spent if users don’t find what they need in your landing page, which means they’ll bounce.
Negative Keywords Implementation
This is almost as important as choosing the right keywords to bid on adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns means that Google won’t show your ad if the visitor types in one of these negative keywords in their search query. This can prevent you from getting irrelevant clicks, which waste ad spend.
How to Identify and Deal with Negative Keywords
Use a keyword research tool to find out irrelevant keywords to your campaign. For example, if you sell premium category items, you would want to add words like “cheap” or “free”.
Adding Negative Keywords
After identifying the negative keywords, you then set them up within your campaign settings. This will ban your ads from surfacing for those keyword search terms, thus saving you from burning your funds without driving any relevant clicks.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your Keywords
Developing keywords for advertising through the PPC campaign does not stop after running the campaign. To see effective results, the process very crucially involves the continuous monitoring of performance followed by adjustment.
Performance Tracking
Use analytics tools to track how your keywords are performing. Track metrics, including CTR, the conversion rate, and ROI, to establish which keywords are doing well and which might need some adjustments or pausing.
Keyword Expansion
Always keep your mind open for the expansion of keyword lists. Use keyword research tools to rapidly detect emerging trends and new keywords that can be invaluable for your campaign.
Bid Adjustments
Increase the bids that you are placing for your keywords based on the performance data for the optimization of the budget. Increases bids on converting well and decreases bids for the ones not getting the desired results.
Read Also: Frustrated With PPC Advertising? Here’s How To Turn It Around
Conclusion
Finding the right keywords to bid on in a PPC campaign is a meticulous process that goes through ongoing optimization, from the planning stage, through research to bidding. By making this work, you can find the most proper keywords that drive targeted traffic to your website, increasing your ROI.
