PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is a powerful digital marketing strategy that allows businesses to drive targeted traffic to their websites and pay only when someone clicks on their ads. One of the critical factors in a successful PPC campaign is choosing the right keywords.
Selecting relevant and high-performing keywords can significantly impact your campaign’s effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). In this article, we will guide you through the process of choosing keywords for PPC to maximize your advertising efforts.
1. Understand your objectives
Before diving into keyword research, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your objectives. Define your goals for your PPC campaign. These could be to promote particular products/services, build brand awareness or more. Understanding these will help you to choose keywords that align with the desired outcomes.
2. Identify your target audience
Knowing your target audience is essential for effective keyword selection. Understand their demographics, preferences, pain points, and what they are searching for. The information will allow you to tailor your keywords to match their search intent accurately.
3. Use keyword tools
There are many tools to help you with keyword research, including Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. Use these to brainstorm and create a list of keyword ideas.
Here are some ways you can use Keyword Planner:
Start by entering a keyword related to your business to generate keyword ideas. You can enter just one or multiple.
Keyword Planner will give information about the keyword you entered and others. Much like SEO, keywords with high average monthly searches and low competition are valuable.
The top-of-page bids are important to look at for PPC as they give an idea of how much the cost-per-click may be if you target that keyword. Depending on your budget, those with a higher top-of-page bid may not be worth targeting.
Alternatively, you can enter a URL and generate keyword ideas from that website or page. Here you can put in your own business’ website and competitor’s to get valuable keyword ideas.
Note down all the keywords you could potentially include in your campaign.
4. Consider search intent
Search intent is crucial when picking your keywords. Users will search for certain keywords when looking to purchase and other keywords when looking for information. Your objectives will influence which type of intent you target.
Informational: Users seeking information. E.g. “How to open a food shop”
Navigational: Users looking for a specific website. E.g. “Tesco website”
Transaction: Users ready to make a purchase. E.g. “Buy wholemeal bread”
Take a look at the keywords you have listed and think about what intent the person searching for them has. For example, someone who searches “lawyers” may be searching to find information about lawyers. Whereas, someone searching for “lawyers near me” is more likely to want to invest in a lawyer.
5. Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are a great asset to your PPC campaign. These are longer and more specific keywords. For example, a short-tail keyword may be “family holidays”, and a long-tail keyword would be “family holidays by the coast UK”.
These more specific keywords may have a lower volume however, they are cheaper and highly targeted. Someone searching for these specific phrases is more likely to know exactly what they want and may be ready to buy.
6. Leverage negative keywords
Negative keywords will prevent your ads from showing up for irrelevant searches. This will save your budget and improve campaign efficiency. For example, a company selling clothing for adults may make “kids” and “children’s” negative.
Google Ads allows you to create negative keyword lists to organise them into categories. Such as “brands” and “generic”.
7. Organise keywords into relevant ad groups
Now you have a list of keywords that is valuable and high in intent you can start to group them. Creating separate ad groups allows you to create more targeted ad copy resulting in better user experience and higher quality scores.
Different businesses will organise their keywords in different ways. They can be grouped by product type, service, location or more.
8. Choose match types
There are three match types you can set your keywords as. You can use all three within an ad group or even have the same keywords targeted as each match type.
Broad match: This match type reaches the widest audience as your ad can appear for search queries including any word in your keyphrase, in any order, and any words related to your keyword. It is the default, so when entering keywords into Google Ads, no formatting is needed.
So if you’re targeting ‘red shoes’, your ad may display for the search queries: ‘green shoes’, ‘red socks’ or ‘dr martin shoes’. Broad match can drive a lot of clicks however, it can result in money wasted on irrelevant clicks.
Phrase match: Phrase match is formatted with quotation marks: “red shoes”. It is slightly more controlled than broad match. Your ad may appear for search queries that have your key phrase in the exact same order but can have words before or after. As well as queries that include synonyms, plurals or close variants of your key phrase.
So “red shoes” ads may display for the search queries: ‘how much are red shoes’, ‘red shoes for sale’ or ‘red flipflops’.
Exact match: Exact match is formatted with brackets: [red shoes]. It is the most specific of the match types. It used to mean ads would only display for users who searched for that exact phrase. However, Google has changed this to mean your ad may appear for searches including synonyms, plurals and other variations of the key phrase.
Targeting [red shoes] means your ad may display for the search queries: [shoes in red], [ruby shoes] or [buy red shoes].
9. Monitor and optimise
Keyword selection for PPC is an ongoing process. You should continuously monitor how they are performing and what search terms are being generated. Identify underperforming keywords that need pausing or refining. As well as new keywords you can add.
Choosing the right keywords for your PPC campaign requires a combination of research, understanding your audience and continuous optimisations. By choosing keywords that align with your business objectives and user intent you can create campaigns that yield positive results for your business.
It is a process that no one gets 100% right the first time, luckily any keyword that is not getting positive results can be paused at any time! Remember, the world of PPC is ever-evolving, so stay up to date with the latest trends and tools to stay ahead of the competition.