How to identify and select your target keywords

Your keywords are the foundation of your campaign. If potential customers are searching for your products or services, they will find you more quickly if you have selected the right keywords. It is important to think like your customers. How might your customers search for your product or service? Some of the best keywords tend to be two to three words long. There are many keyword research tool to help you with this process providing suggestions for new keywords based on real search data.

Think of the sequence of search terms that users use to tailor your targeting and messages within AdWords.

 

Understanding customer search behavior is so important since it enables you to:

 

• Understand customer behavior to see whether the products, services, and content you offer match customer behaviors

• Set goals for how much reach and visits are possible within your market

• Benchmark your performance against competitors (direct and publishers)

• Diagnose problems at a keyword or keyword group level on performance through a gap analysis.

For this, to work, you need a keyword master file that you use to review and control performance through gap analysis.

 

 Ensure you have good visibility of customer search behavior against results delivered.

 Use Exact match to get realistic volumes of demand.

 

Build up a list of qualifiers or adjectives which describe the search

 

Typical keyword variants used by search engines are:

• Intended use/application

• Vendor/Brand

• Comparison/quality

• Product type

• Location

• Adjective (price/product qualifiers)

You’re not going to be able to manage your keywords so well if you have a single long list of undifferentiated keyword, so check you’re grouping them in a logical order.

When identifying keywords, it’s essential not to simply have a long list but group them to make them manageable. Each keyword you identify as important should be placed in a group similar to the types above.

 

 Group your keywords logically for analysis and management. The most common are groups of product or service categories and sub-categories.

 

Exploit the ‘long tail’ of search

If you base your search marketing strategy on just 10 to 20 keywords, you will be limiting your exposure. There will be a large number of less popular keywords that won’t find you. To maximize visitor numbers, hundreds of keyword will be appropriate. To maximize quality, fewer more specific keywords will be needed.

For e-commerce sites, the sky’s the limit. Some banks have thousands of keyphrases, while some e-retailers have tens of thousands. All these depend on high volumes of traffic.

You should review the importance of the long tail within search and develop strategies to exploit it.

Copywriters for SEO need to know the qualifiers used so they can target the most important key phrases. The best way to summarize these is through writing out the semantics of a sentence like this: <qualifier> + <core term> + <post modifier>. Example: ‘children’s savings accounts in the USA’.

Your keywords should be organized by common themes or products. Think about and list all the keywords you want to use and then group similar keywords together. The next stage is to organize them into your account in a structured way.

 

Low search volume keywords

Once you’ve added your keyword list to your AdWords account, you may notice Google giving several keywords the status ‘Low Search Volume.’ Any keyword that is classified in this way will not be eligible to be entered into the auction. This is one of the most frustrating problems with AdWords – Google simply won’t let you bid on a large part of the long tail. Instead, you need to make sure that higher volume terms are within the account on a broad enough match type to cover off any searches for these lower volume queries.