PPC Keyword Research The Easy Way
Keyword research for a pay per click campaign has to be done right, but it doesn’t always have to be long and complicated and take up many hours of your time. In fact, you can do it very successfully in a much shorter short time span. At the end of this article you will learn of a sneaky way of finding the best keywords… from your competition!
Before you do anything else, first download and install the free version of Good Keywords, which is at version 3 at the time of writing. This will help you to sort and organize your keyword lists and much more.
Now you can find your keywords.
There’s no getting away from the fact that the right keywords are essential for a profitable pay per click campaign but too many can become unmanageable. While some people have many thousands of keywords, a smaller keyword list is much easier to handle.
You can use Wordtracker’s free keyword tool to get a few keyword suggestions for your chosen market and use these to start off your PPC campaign.
One reason to use Wordtracker’s free keyword tool is that it only returns the top 100 based on your root keyword. Any more than that and you might be overwhelmed with too many keywords.
Something you should note about Wordtracker is that the search counts are not very accurate and are probably something like one eighth of the Google search count. The true search count will only become apparent to you when you test your keywords in a real Google Adwords campaign. It’s not the volume of searches for each keyword that matters so much as how well it converts into sales.
Let’s take the paid surveys niche as an example. By focusing on the obvious phrases like ‘paid survey’ or ‘paid surveys’ you are going to find that 80 – 90% of the sales, traffic and searches are going to come from keywords like that in these smaller markets – the obvious phrases that people search for.
To get started just enter a few of your root keywords such as ‘paid survey’, ‘paid surveys’, ‘online surveys’ ‘get paid to take surveys’ etc. and enter them onto the free Wordtracker Keyword tool. Once you have your lists of keywords copy and paste them into Notepad.
Now organize your keywords.
You need to enter your keyword list into Good Keywords v3 to clean it up and get rid of any duplicate keywords.
Here’s how…
(1) Have your keyword list open and ready in Notepad.
(2) Run the Good Keywords v3 software.
(3) Select the ‘Keyword Manager’ tab.
(4) Select Add on the Input List section.
(5) Paste your list from Notepad into the ‘Add Keywords’ box that appears.
(6) Click on Duplicate on the ‘Remove Unwanted’ section to remove duplicates.
7) Next, go to the ‘Output’ section and select Copy to Clipboard.
(8) Paste these keywords back into Notepad
(9) Divide them into groups ready to put them onto Adwords.
Right, you now have a tidy list of keywords but how do you know if they are any good for PPC?
I suppose you could simply start a new PPC campaign to test them out but it might cost you a bit before you know if they are any good. However, there is a much better way to find out which keywords will convert…by spying on your competition!
Discovering your competitors’ keywords is one way that you can manually compile a good list of keywords for your pay per click campaign. After all, they have done all the keyword research and are already making money from it. You may think that doing this is a little unethical but I can assure you that others will do it to you given a chance.
There is software available that will show you what keywords other people use in their pay per click campaigns, which is a sure way of gathering relevant keywords for your Adwords campaign. Some of it is quite expensive though.
Of course, you can spy on your competitors’ manually if you knew where to start, but it is time-consuming and tedious to say the least, so why not make it easier on yourself?
One piece of software I can recommend that will do most of this for you is Affiliate Espionage created by a PPC . This will expose your competitors’ profitable PPC campaigns very easily.
- Compiles keywords an advertiser is bidding on,
- Identifies which affiliate networks they are using,
- Identifies if they are affiliates or not,
- Locates other sites the competition owns
- and so much more..
The good thing is that it’s very inexpensive compared to other keyword spy tools but still delivers good results. If you want a shortcut to getting the best keywords for your Adwords campaigns then it could be just the thing you need.
Find out more about Affiliate Espionage here:
