Using Paid Search Keywords Correctly to Build Your Online Business
In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about
stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul. So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.
Trick #1 – Use Keywords Correctly
A great misnomer among PPC advertisers is the belief that the
foundation to success for an account is found in picking the right
keywords. While picking good keywords is important, it’s not the
foundation. The foundation is knowing how to use keywords to find search queries that you can use to attract customers to your website. That’s right, keywords are different than search queries.
Search queries are the phrases that real users actually type into the
search engines. Remember, keywords are like nets that you throw into
Search Engine Sea to find the fish (search queries) that you will then
use to prepare dinner.
How do you build your account around search queries? Well, an easy
way is to make sure to separate your winning search query catches from
your nets. Once you catch a fish, you don’t leave it in the net,
right? That will just get in the way of catching other fish when you
throw the net back in. Therefore, we’ve got to use the organizational
features that the paid search interfaces give us to put the fish in a
bucket so that we can skin and fillet (optimize) it.
This is easily accomplished by separating your nets and your fish
into separate campaigns. Your “net” campaign will contain keywords that
use match types effectively (we’ll get to this soon) to go out and
catch the fish. Your “bucket” campaign will contain the search queries
you have found to be winners. You will set these search queries on
“exact match” so that they will only be matched to the exact query that
you found works for your business. Yes, I know that once you add the
query to your account that it (technically-speaking) becomes a
“keyword,” but since it will only be matched to the exact query, we can
view it as such.
The bucket campaigns is where you will build your account from what you caught in the net campaign. This
separation allows you to separately control budgeting, bidding and
other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the
locations that really put food on the table.
For example, if we create a “fishing” campaign that uses the keyword
“red shoes” on broad match, it will be matched to thousands of real
search queries like “red nike tennis shoes” or even “purple slippers” (broad match can be very broad).
Yes, you may find that the exact query “red shoes” works for you and
meets your advertising goals. But, long-term business growth against
your competition requires that you go fishing for as many queries as you can make work for your business.
So, let’s say your main keyword theme is “red shoes.” Through
keyword research, you add many relevant keyword phrases to your “net”
campaign. As ads run on these keywords, they will be collected and you
are able to view them in your account. Here’s an illustration of what
it’s like. The keywords you add to your campaigns are in the middle.
The actual search queries that users are performing are in the small
bubbles…
Now, what
do you do with these? You take a look at their relevance and
statistics to decide whether to continue advertising on those terms or
not, and whether or not they’ve performed well enough to be implemented
into your net campaign for different treatment. There will be a lot of
terms to add as negatives, some to throw into the bucket, some will need
more time, and some may need special attention to figure out why they are not performing as well as you might think.
Next time, we’ll take a look at how you may treat these groups differently.
Mike Fleming specializes in Analytics and Paid Search for Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. You can follow Mike on Twitter at @SEMFlem. Mike enjoys playing, writing and recording music along with playing basketball to get his workout in. He resides in Canton, Ohio with a girl who threw a snowball at him one day…then married him.
Mike and the team at Pole Position are available to help clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Contact them via their site or by phone at 866-685-3374.
Good post. I’m a strong believer in using as many negative keywords as possible when targeting broad keywords so I like the fact that you advised people to be careful when using broad terms. I find the phrase and exact matches to be much more efficient.
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