Finding the right keywords for your AdWords campaign

In Google AdWords, you begin building campaigns by selecting keywords to target. This task is more challenging than it sounds, and if you want your campaign to succeed, it’s essential that you do it well. While it’s easy enough to generate a list of words that relate to your business, they may not be valuable in the context of a paid search campaign.

When we develop keywords for our clients, here are some important qualities we’re looking for.

1) Specificity

Imagine our company sells vehicles. But they aren’t ordinary vehicles; they’re vehicles like the Mars Rover that can drive on other planets while being piloted remotely. Instead of targeting “vehicles” as a keyword, we’d want to qualify it as “space vehicles.” Better yet, “DemandZEN space vehicles.” Beyond that, we’d identify specific products, features and benefits.

Some of these hyper-specific terms may not generate much search volume on their own. They should be included as one of many long-tail keywords that, over time, can provide significant ROI. Another big benefit of long-tail keywords is that they tend to be less expensive per-click.

Looking for the right keywords.

2) Purchase intent

Once we’ve developed a keyword list that’s specific to the product/service, we test adding terms that indicate a level of commercial intent. Try adding buy/purchase, reviews, pricing and ranking on top of your existing phrases. Each of these searches suggests that the prospect is shopping around and not merely searching for basic information.

3) Volume

Sometimes, unfortunately, the keywords most relevant to your business don’t receive much search volume. In that case, developing a big list of long-tail keywords is particularly helpful. So is actively testing synonyms and more indirect ways of establishing buyer interest. In our example, we would try things like “remote robotics” and “planetary rovers,” along with problems our product solves, for instance: “how to survey alien planet terrain.”

4) Relevance

After you’ve generated your list, it’s important to actively prevent your ads from showing on unhelpful searches. This is done by creating a Negative Keywords list. Actively managing your Negative Keywords list is an easy way to reduce wasted spend. Within AdWords, you can see which search queries triggered your ads, and you can then use this list to figure out which queries to block.

___

DemandZEN provides outsourced demand generation for companies looking to aggressively expand their revenue opportunities. Follow us @Demand_ZEN