AdWords Adviser

Archive for October 8th, 2009

When it’s time to start that new AdWords campaign or expand an existing one, it’s surprising how many people don’t know how to do keyword research properly.

I know, your impatient to get going, eager to watch the visitors roll in and anxious to experience that feeling of excitement as the sales start to rack up. But, the harsh reality is that you’re going to miss out on hundreds of keywords that could benefit your business if you don’t do your keyword research first.

To fully exploit your niche and beat the competition, you must “dig deep and go wide”.

I’ll explain what this statement means to you later in this post.

But first …

Create Your Seed Keyword List

In every instance keyword research starts with a single seed keyword and a good keyword selection tool.

A seed keyword is any short, popular keyword relevant to your market on which you can build your keyword list.  And a keyword selection tool will effortlessly expand your seed keyword into a list of related keywords that match what people enter into a search engine when they perform a query.

Everyone will be familiar with the Google Keyword Tool, that’s included with your AdWords account. However, years of experience with creating and running AdWords campaigns have shown me that you’ll get better results that are easier to understand from Wordtracker.

Wordtracker will return hundreds of keywords used recently in search queries, that contain your seed keyword within them.

Imagine , for example, you’re running a small business from home that makes chocolates. To market your business with AdWords you might use “chocolates” as your seed keyword.

After typing your seed keyword into Wordtracker, you get over 25,000 searches. Looking down the list you pick out some useful keywords for your seed list which include:

• chocolate chip cookies
• chocolate strawberries
• chocolate bars
• dark chocolate

These are all phrases that describe products you make and sell in your business.

Dig Deep And Find Your Keyword Tails

Just a few seconds ago, I told you that to fully exploit your niche and beat your AdWords competition, you’ll have to “dig deep and go wide”. You’re now going to use the seed keyword list you’ve just created to dig deep and find even more keywords for your campaign.

Enter each phrase from your seed list into Wordtracker to create more keyword lists for each keyword. These new lists are your keyword tails.

Returning to the previous example, selling home made chocolates, to dig deep into your seed keyword list you’d type each phrase into Wordtracker and pick out all the relevant keywords for your business to create your keyword tails.

Typing “chocolate chip cookies” into Wordtracker returned over 2000 searches. Some of the most relevant keywords found were:

• chewy chocolate chip cookies
• oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
• best chocolate chip cookies
• healthy chocolate chip cookies
• double chocolate chip cookies

All describe the different types of chip cookies your business sells.

Repeating the exercise using “chocolate strawberries” this time returns keywords like:

• chocolate covered strawberries
• chocolate dipped strawberries
• strawberries in chocolate
• strawberries with chocolate

These are all excellent keywords that could be used to describe your business. Notice now your seed list is starting to very quickly build into a very powerful list of quality keywords for your AdWords campaign.

You’ve Dug Deep, Now Go Wide

To “go wide” with your keyword research, create a new seed keyword list with phrases that describe different categories within your niche.

Categories that you’d search on for your chocolate business would include:

• easter chocolate
• valentine’s day chocolate
• christmas chocolate
• halloween chocolate

These are all examples of special occasions when people might buy chocolate. Targeting keywords in AdWords for these occasions a few weeks previous to the day would therefore be a good strategy for your business.

You can now create a new keyword tail for each of these categories by once again entering each phrase in your new keyword seed list into Wordtracker and picking out the keywords that are right for your business.

WordTracker, Your Keyword Tool Of Choice

Now finally, you are starting to understand how to do keyword research for AdWords right and using WordTracker, create huge lists of keywords to use in your campaign that are all highly targeted to your business.

But, I can almost hear your mind saying how recording and keeping track of all these lists in spreadsheets is going to be a very long and time consuming task.

There is only one solution to this and that is to use the advanced features of Wordtracker to create and store your keyword lists for you until you’re ready to use them in your AdWords campaign. This simple feature alone will save you many hours of work and make keyword research a lot easier.

P.S. When you start using Wordtracker to do your keyword research, you’ll soon be able to quickly and easily build huge keyword lists for your AdWords campaigns.