With Christmas and New Year out of the way it is time to knuckle down to some good hard work again, and what better way to start your new year than to re-evaluate your keyword targeting procedure and make sure that you are capturing every single keyword you can?
The Keyword is King
Yes, you read that right, whether you are working on PPC (pay-per click) or indulging in a spot of SEO (search engine optimisation), your work is nothing without some solid keyword groundwork done from the outset. Without an exhaustive list of the potential target keywords your PPC and SEO efforts stand firmly in no-man's land, and that is not good for anyone.
So, you're new year's resolution this year should be a nice simple one: don't miss a single keyword this year. This might sound a tough task, but fear not, because I have a fool proof way to ensure that you can capture all of the keywords you need to make your digital marketing efforts a true success.
Starting Keyword Research
To start your keyword research (the most time consuming and intangible stage of any PPC and SEO mission), you will need to do some thorough brainstorming. Write down all of the phrases and words relevant to what you want to achieve, ask your friends, family and colleagues what words they can think of and read as much material as you can to capture as many keywords as you can think of.
We have all been there; a couple of hours into the research and you already have an unwieldy list of words that even a room full of MENSA members with super-computers for brains would have trouble getting their head's around.
So, what is a digital marketing expert to do with this seemingly unmanageable list of blurb? Well, the answer is quite simple and quite brilliant, you need to wrestle all of those keywords into an organised list. This is where a little bit of PPC logic comes in handy (for those of you more on the SEO side). Like planning a PPC campaign, keywords are all about themes.
Keyword Themes: How to Organise your Keywords
Keywords can be separated and organised by choosing themes. This is where a bit of PPC-type-thought comes in handy. With PPC, the aim of the game is to organise your ads into groups, this could be by product type, or actual product etc. Do the same with your keywords, take them and separate them based on their type. See the list below:
mp3 players
cheap mp3 players
ipods
sony mp3 players
The keyword list above can be separated into 4 groups of keywords. The first will be general 'mp3 player' keywords, the second will be keywords which use the 'cheap' or 'budget' theme. The third set of keywords will be a brand keyword group for 'Apple mp3 players' and similarly the last will be 'Sony mp3 player' keywords.
Organise and Multiply
As you can see, we now have four groups of keyword themes. each group has a distinct keyword type and because of this we can break the keywords down into their component parts and this where the fun begins and we can start to build huge lists of keywords.
Let's take the second keyword group we have: 'cheap mp3 players'. We already have one keyword here: 'cheap mp3 players' but we also know that there are lots of ways to say precisely the same thing, and as we know, our aim is to not miss a single keyword.
Breaking up our keyword we are left with the following: an adjective; 'cheap' and the noun; 'mp3 players'. With the keyword broken up into components we are able to create a table with columns for any components a keyword theme may have. See below for an example of what I mean:
Cost
Description
Product Type
Storage Size
Cheap
Portable
mp3 player
16gb
Budget
music player
32gb
mp3
etc...
The table above has four columns, which serve the purpose of allowing different attribute types for our keyword themes. The first is really the leader of this theme, it is the 'cheap' theme that the keywords in this list will all share. Similarly, the product type is also crucial to this keyword theme. There are also columns for other descriptive angles we can add to the existing 'cost' and 'product type' to further enhance the keyword theme. As I am sure you have worked out, you can add more columns to taste, depending on how deep you want to go.
Now that we have the table above, we can continue to fill in the columns and even add other columns if there are any other attributes to the product we could use as a cross section of the results.
It is now time to multiply your keywords. Simply by arranging the above table elements into different orders you can make a large number of keywords with relative ease. Here are a few examples of the keywords I can make from the table above:
cheap mp3 player
cheap 16gb mp3 player
32gb music player cheap
budget mp3 16gb
As you can see, making lists of keywords in this way serves two fantastic functions; one is it allows you to quickly create exhaustive lists of words and secondly if you keep an eye on what words you are using you can literally find every single keyword for the theme you are looking at.
Every Keyword in the World!
So now you know how you can literally find every single keyword you need. This method introduces some much needed order into the relative chaos that is keyword research and allows you to keep a cool head as well as reveal keywords you may otherwise have missed.
The benefits of this are fantastic. For PPC managers it means that if you are planning an AdGroup you can make sure that every keyword angle is covered. For those in SEO it means that you can highlight that elusive target keyword for the page you are working on and ensure that you have considered every possible angle.
This really is the bedrock of word based digital marketing and I urge you to give this method a go, it will make the whole process of keyword research a lot less stressful and a lot more productive.
If you would like to speak to Indulge Media about how we can help you with your keyword management, PPC advertising and SEO then please visit our contact page.
