Keywords

How many times have you searched for information or a product online?

When the first set of results does not immediately display what you expect then you modify the keyword search terms until you find what you want.

You don’t perform the search once and then keep digging pages deep.

Make it easy for potential customers to find you: anticipate all the keywords they could use when searching for your product or service.

The foundation of any successful SEO or AdWords campaign is selecting the right keywords.

Get this wrong and the whole house of cards falls down – in fact it won’t even get built. 

Simply put keywords are the phrases searchers enter into Google. They are the words that the man in the street believes will help him find what he is looking for.

The first rule then is not to assume everyone is an expert in your field. How many times have you watched a hospital drama and not understood a word of the medical terminology. What doctors call cardiac the rest of us call a heart.

What you need to do is put yourself in the place of the layman and anticipate the terminology they will use when they want to find what you have to offer.

There is no right and wrong here you can even keyword misspellings.

You don’t need to limit your list either, remember you only pay when someone clicks on your ad so it doesn’t really matter if no one clicks as you won’t pay – one day someone will use that keyword and hey presto they’ll get to see your ad.

The trick is to start off small with all the obvious words – one word of warning – everyone else will be bidding on those keywords as well so they’ll cost you a lot more than less frequently searched terms.

Keyword Value

Each keyword has a dynamic value based upon the amount the market is bidding for that particular keyword in real time.

They are like commodities and the technology allows their value to reflect current activity as well as historical data. We all have a budget and the trick is to balance keyword performance relative to budget.

There is no shortage of clicks for 90% of our clients, the challenge is to ensure budget does not run out and prevent the ad from being displayed especially if it contains a phone number.

What we can then do is over time collect real data on the actual phrases searchers are using in your market area. These are usually two three or more words and the phrase can be bid for a lot less.

They don’t get clicked on as often but if the list is big enough it will balance out. This is the real trick to making the budget stretch further.

Next we need to look at the meanings inferred by the syntax. At one end of the spectrum the keyword [cars] could be used to find a massive variety of products or services and will get masses of traffic but not very targeted.

There are very few advertisers large enough to benefit from using this kind of keyword most budgets would run out in minutes.

At the other end of the spectrum the phrase [best deal 78 mustang car chicago today] has a very specific meaning. If you lived in Chicago and wanted to sell a 78 Mustang that would work for you. You would get very little traffic but every searcher would be ready to buy right now so conversion would be very high and the keyword would be relatively cheap.

You need to figure out exactly what your conversion goals are and then select keywords that will achieve those goals for you.

You need a plan. There’s a lot more to all of this than you may have originally thought – it really is a science.

That’s where we come in. We are pros and will build the best keyword lists your budget allows. We then have to take into account different matching options. If we want to exclude certain types of buyers we’ll use negative keywords, that sort of thing. 

Key wording is an ongoing, dynamic process that evolves in the same way as new terminology. 

If you don’t stay on top of it you can be sure your competition will and they’ll be displaying their ads to your potential customers.