Selecting Keywords for your Pay per Click Campaigns

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I’ve managed and reviewed many pay per click (PPC) campaigns and one of the things that businesses find problematic is selecting the right keywords to include. You’re pretty much free to sponsor as many keywords as you want in a PPC campaign, although you need to structure your ad groups so that keywords are grouped and targeted to your ads and the page of your site the visitor will land on.

All of the PPC providers have a free tool built in that helps you to select keywords to sponsor so that’s a good place to start. Firstly brainstorm keywords you want to include and don’t forget to ask your friends and contacts for ideas as they may use different search queries from you. The keywords tools will bring up further suggestions based on your lists and also give you information on how competitive the keywords are and how much they may cost to sponsor.

Once you’ve drawn up your list, make sure you don’t include any single word keywords. Using single words means your ads will show for much less targeted keyword combinations and will probably be more expensive. You also need to make sure that you include plurals in your keywords. Google Adwords requires inclusion of both so if you only put singular keywords, your ads won’t necessarily show for the plurals.

You can also add negative keywords into your lists – these are keywords which could potentially trigger your ads but you don’t want them to as they’re not targeted. For example, if you’re providing event management to companies, you may not want your ads to show up if someone types in ‘event management jobs’. So ‘jobs’ would be a negative keyword.

Once you’re happy with your list and all your keywords have been segmented into appropriate ad groups, you need to keep a close eye on which keywords work and which ones don’t. It may become apparent quite quickly which keywords are highly competitive and your keywords will end up far down the list or you’ll get a high number of impressions and few clicks. This is the time to start refining your campaign to ensure you get the best return from it.

Pay per click does require a lot of management at the beginning, but once you get into a pattern of gaining good click through rates and keep on top of your budget, you should find that your return outperforms your costs.

Whatever you do though, just make sure you track the return from your ads – I wrote about ways to do this in my recent post, Measuring your Marketing ROI.

About Sam

Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.