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Researching Keywords: Strategies and ToolsIn the perfect Adwords campaign, every click leads to a sale, and you don’t miss any clicks that could have led to a sale. In real life, of course, such a perfect campaign is impossible. But it’s the goal of everything you’re doing. Your keyword selection represents a balancing act between hyper-aggressive and hyper-conservative: - Hyper-aggressive: If you choose every keyword in the universe, you won’t miss anybody, but your CTR will be microscopic and your bid prices will be astronomical. - Hyper-conservative: If you bid only on the very obvious keywords, you’ll miss a lot of sales from prospects who approach the search process differently from you. The ideal balance point is the one that maximizes your business goals, whatever they are. If you are advertising a for-profit business, your goal may simply be the highest possible profits. You may sacrifice some profits for quality of life, and go for the highest ROI. If you’re building a company to sell, you may prefer to build a huge subscriber base to earning profits up front. Whatever the goal, the same three-part strategy applies: 1. Start with the obvious keywords. Make a list of the keywords you would search if you were your customer. 2. From there, go laterally into synonyms and related searches. Conduct the research, use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, and one or more of the tools described a little later in this article. 3. Tweak or fire underperforming keywords and keep looking for new ones. Part III shows you how to manage your AdWords campaigns to continually improve your results. Eventually, you’ll have a stable of reliably profitable keywords pointing to the appropriate ads, taking visitors to effective Web sites. The Free Keyword ToolYou can use the Free Keyword Tool at www.askhowie.com/freewords to generate related search terms. Simply type the main keyword in the box and click Submit to receive a list of 100 related terms. You can research each of the top 100 terms by clicking it the tool will return the keywords (and their search volumes) for all keywords that include the one you typed. You can explore the keyword landscape, and download keywords to your computer in a file that you can open in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets. Google’s keyword toolsYou can use that tool to find thousands of keywords related to your main ones. Google searches Web sites similar to yours and references its huge search database to help you discover the words other people have used to get what you can give them. KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker sitesThese two Web-based services, available at www.keyworddiscovery.com and www.wordtracker.com, respectively, are comprehensive and competing keyword research tools. Every serious AdWords user I know relies on one of these not-so-cheap tools. They both give you hundreds or thousands of keywords related to broad search terms. They tell you how many times the keywords have been searched in the recent past. They allow you to download keywords and counts into spreadsheets or text files. They let you create projects to store your words. Neither is cheap, although WordTracker thoughtfully offers a week-long subscription for around $30. |
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