Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is one of the best ways to get your products or services in front of your target market. With a professionaly built PPC campaign you can set which keywords will trigger your adverts, so when a user searches for one of those keywords your ads will appear at the top of the search results. High quality, well written adverts with the right corresponding keywords tend to appear higher in the search results.

PPC can be VERY effective, but only if setup and optimised in the right way. It’s very important for digital marketing teams to understand PPC and how Google determins good campaigns from bad ones. One of the most important factors of a well built PPC campaign is keyword research. To select the right keywords you will need to determine which keywords will work best for your business, one of the best ways to do this is to see what your competitors are doing and is working for them.

So What Is PPC Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a fairly straight forward, you need to find out the best keywords to use for your ads and then set your bids to get the best possible ROI. You normally want to bid higher on the keywords that yield the best return. It’s important that you think about and find out which keywords people just use for research and which are buying keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to understand how PPC keywords work so you can make the right decisions not only on what keywords to pick but the search type you use for those keywords. You need to think carefully about what kinds of search terms your ideal customers will be using to find your products and services. You also need to think about where in the buying process they will be, are you setting up a campaign early on in the buying process? If so you need to select the right keywords for that and make sure you send them to an informational page. If you want to capture them later on in the buying process, think about buying keywords and send them to your sales page.

Tips To Help You With PPC Keyword Research

Here are a few simple tips you can use to help you select the right keywords for your campaign.

  • Brainstorm First. Before using keyword research tools, sit down with a pen and paper and think about what your target customers would type into Google when they are looking for your products or services. Create a multi-tiered list of potential keywords including your brand keywords, keywords related to your industry, product and service keywords, competitor keywords, general information keywords and sales keywords.
  • Research your competition. Check out what your competitors are doing. There are software tools available to help you spy on your competitors or your PPC management agency will do the work for you. You can also try typing keywords into Google and see what comes up. If you want your agency to do the work for you, compile a list of competitors websites they can research for you.
  • Create adgroups. AdGroups are groups of keywords. Start by putting your keywords into categories. This will help you focus on specific keywords, it will also help you optimise your campaigns in the future..
  • Don’t forget negative keywords. Don’t just think about what you want to be found for think about what you don’t want to be found for. In every industry there are keywords that also relate to something else in another niche. Think about what mistakes people could make. For example if you are a security company offering security guards you might want to use negative  keywords such as “virus” and “software”.
  • Use Google’s Keyword Planner. Google provides a tool to help you select keywords and is available in your Google Ads account. This tool makes PPC keyword research easier and helps you find keywords with the most traffic and the lowest competition.
  • Keep Monitoring and Updating. Keyword research is an on going process, you need to keep updating your list. You need to track conversions and see which keywords work and which don’t. Do you need to make alterations to these keywords? Do you need to use longer tail keywords for better conversion rates. Do you need to add to your negative keyword list? PPC management is an on going process and your accounts should be worked on regularly.

PPC keyword research is often thought of as a straight forward process but is actually quite complex and an area that we often find is the cause of accounts spending money unnecessarily. Your keywords will require consistent attention and some creative thinking! You also need to be prepared to experiment and test keywords, at the beginning you need to be willing to invest some money on your campaigns, the key is to have conversion tracking setup and adjust your keyword lists as needed. Remember there is no point in paying for PPC ads that do not convert into telephone calls or online sales.