How do I choose my keywords for AdWords? Answer Request

Identifying right keywords sometimes can be overwhelming, but it pays off in the long run. If you pick the right keywords for your business, you can possibly get higher click-through rates and a high click-through rate often helps in improving the quality score of the keywords.

There are two possible situations that might be the product of poor choice of keywords.

• If your ads are being displayed for irrelevant searches, your budget can get exhausted without seeing any conversions. This happens because these are not quality clicks. It is very unlikely to get good conversion from these clicks.
• Another possible situation is that there might not be many clicks. Users might just skip your ad as they are not interested in it. Your click-through rate can fall down alarmingly and trigger a fall in quality score. Your cost-per-click will be soaring high following a drop in CTR and QS.

Having established the significance of keywords, let’s move on to a step-by-step process of setting right keywords for your business.

Identifying keywords from your search query report

If you are already advertising in AdWords, Look for patterns in your search query report. You can easily find searches with good impressions which has not yet been targeted via an exact keyword match.

Such a keyword which users are actually searching, can get you a good click-through rate and quality score.

Fishing keywords from open-source resources

You can look on web for some open-source keyword lists, they are available in abundance. But the catch here is that not all these are relevant to your business. I would suggest use these resources to get an idea of how keyword selection is done across various industries and different businesses.

Using Google Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword tool uses historic data, not just across your account, but similar accounts in your domain to suggest you relevant keywords.

Insights from competitor research

Your competitor might have already spent enough time and resources to pick right keywords. Understand what keywords they are ranking for. If they seem relevant to you, try to use them and beat them out.

Intuition

Even though most advertisers start off by using intuition-driven keywords, there is a reason for mentioning this at the bottom of the list. When you are still new, your intuition might not be the best way to go about. But after following the steps above this, you are now better informed that when you just started.

1) Start with your website - make sure that everything (product and/or service) on your site is a keyword in AdWords

2) Add adjectives and Intention keywords - once you have your baseline of keyword, based on your offering, add the different ways people may search for them. for example: “best” “cheapest” “near me” “for sale” etc. Add all these variations that you can think of and make sense. Once you begin, you will likely discover more ideas in the search query report (search terms).

3) Leverage tools - such as Google Keyword planner, or competitor analysis such as SpyFu. I usually do this after the first two steps as a way to check myself and catch anything I may have overlooked.

Don’t be worried about adding “too many” keywords, as long as you have a solid structure - that you can manage effectively - this “long tail” is what will separate you from your competitors, as most just build basic campaigns and try to bid up their way to market share and profitably (spoiler alert: it doens’t usually work!)

If you have any questions feel free to reach out, as I’d be happy to help. Lior