When it comes to creating a successful pay-per click campaign there really is only one place to start. Although I say that this tactic is a secret, it is not really, or at least it shouldn't be. Like many of the best ideas it uses common sense as its main ingredient and with a little bit of productive time invested you can gather some fantastic results in a relatively short space of time.
Keyword Research
The secret to a successful pay-per click campaign starts, and quite often ends with some keyword research. As you may or may not already know, the major basis of pay-per click is focussed on keywords and what search engine users are typing into the search bar in order to find what they are looking for.
When we consider this, the value of choosing the correct keyowrds already becomes aparant. The start to your research should begin with a simple brainstorming session. You can brainstorm for as long as you like really, and quite often it can help if you get the rest of your office involved in the process.
Brainstorming Keywords
To brainstorm your keywords, simply open up your notebook, or a spreadsheet and write down a list of words that you would want to type in to find your website. To keep things even more simple, think or each page on your website as a separate entity and brainstorm separately for each. In this case, work on your home page. Let's say that you are a web design agency based in Guernsey (like us!), the brainstorming session would take the shape of writing down a list of words that one would type into Google to find our website, words like:
Guernsey web design
web design in Guernsey
cheap websites
designers
website coding
etc etc you get the idea
Now, of course you and your colleagues will have expert knowledge of your services and will know all of the different variations of keywords people may type in order to find your website. Try and get the list as broad and interesting as you can, don't worry if your list gets too long because the stages that follow are designed to thin down the list until you have a short list of highly valuable keywords for your business.
Researching Your Keywords
Now that you have a nice long list of potential keywords to work with, it is time to get onto the internet and begin the bread and butter stage of keyword research. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, one of the best established keyowrd research tools out there, and it is free!
The Google tool is going to be where you will spend most of your time now. There are indeed other tools available, but for the purposes of teaching a belts and braces method of refining a list of keywords the Google Keyword Research Tool will more than suffice, I use it on a day to day basis working in the Digital Marketing Services department at Indulge Media anyway!
Refining Your List of Keywords
So, now you must take your long list of keywords and whittle it down into 10 to 15 keywords. The way you do this is simply by using Google AdWords Keyword Tool, type in the keywords and find the magic combination. The magic combination is when the correct circumstances come together to create the perfect keyword selection. When targetting keywords you want to look for two things. One is the keyword competition. In the Keyword Tool, this is displayed by the green bar. The other thing you want to look for is search frquency, these are the numbers next to the competition bar, displayed as global search and local search.
Essentially, the aim is to find relevant keywords that have a high search rate coupled with a low competition rate, we would call this keyword an opportunity! One thing to keep in mind when using the Keyword Tool is that Google like to keep their cards close to their respective chests and so all of the metrics are proportional to the search you are making, as opposed to completely accurate. This does not pose any problems so long as you always use the same method when judging keywords. If you choose local search as your metric, stick with that, and make sure all keyword selections have a relatively high local search rate.
So, that is the basics of keyword research. Never should you embark on PPC, or SEO for that matter, without firm foundations in keyword research.
