How to Find the Best Keywords for Your PPC Campaign

What makes a great PPC campaign? What makes the difference between a waste of cash that you never get back and a campaign that you can use to continuously keep growing and scaling your organization?

While there are a lot of factors, you could certainly make the argument that one of the most important of these is the keywords. Your keywords are of course the search terms that you’re going to target. With both Google AdWords and Bing Ads, you’re going to be advertising in such a way that your ads end up showing on search engine results pages for specific searches.

You can then choose precisely which searches bring up your adverts and this is going to impact on how sees the ads and what difference this makes for your success.

So the question is: how do you go about picking the right keywords? What is the difference between a good keyword and a bad one?

Let’s take a closer look…

The Basics

The basic idea behind your keyword choice is that you’re going to try and ensure that the phrase you pick is one that the right people are going to be looking for. Who are the right people? Of course, they’re the ones who are most likely to buy your product.

This is also how Facebook Ads work it lets you choose the type of person you want to target by looking at the details they fill out such as their age, sex, location, and even hobbies and interests. The difference with a search term is that it is also time-sensitive. In other words, a search term will have a bigger impact on your eventual profits because you are showing ads to someone at the precise time that someone is actually looking for your site.

For example, if you’re trying to sell hats, then your search term would be ‘buy hats online. That means you’re not only targeting people who want hats but you’re also targeting people who want hats now.

So when picking keywords, think about who and when.

Negative Keywords

One way you can make this a little more precise and specific is to try and avoid certain search terms from showing your ads. This is what is known as a ‘negative keyword’ and a good example of this might be the word ‘free’. You don’t want people to click on your ad if they’re searching for free things, because they won’t be likely to want to buy anything off you – and that means they’re costing you money without earning you anything back.

Keyword Research

More important still is to do your research.

That means looking to find out just how often certain keywords actually get searched for, rather than assuming. For instance, some phrases that might at first sound popular can actually end up being surprisingly unpopular. This meaning of course that no one ever searches for them and thus they won’t bring any visitors.

Likewise, you also need to research the amount of competition for each keyword and aim for the terms that aren’t saturated!