For any website hoping to talk to the public about something, anything, keywords and keyword phrases are the bridges that connect us here on the marketing side, to that public, via the search engines. Keywords become an even more integral component of your pay-per-click campaign. Here, the ability to properly identifying the best search terms will literally save you money immediately, on click costs. We all know what popular keywords are, most search terms are common sense. If you are looking for a real estate agent in New York, "New York real estate" is a keyword phase most people are going to type into Google. There will be a large amount of traffic going to those results, and the websites that are effectively competing for that term are going to receive the lion’s share of traffic. But unless you have deep pockets to afford an extremely expensive search term, and then sift through a wide debris of irrelevant leads and information, this is not the most effective campaign. That “gut hunch” could spell disaster, or at least lead to inefficiencies in your campaign. Another example, perhaps just as many people are searching for “Homes for Sale” as are searching for “Real Estate”. To neglect one or the other would mean losing all that traffic and potential leads to the competition. Here are some keys to maximizing your keyword list:
- Don’t target single keywords
- Do target geographically-specific and niche service-specific keywords
- Be clever and try to find overlooked phrases
- Use Wordtracker
- Use the Google Keyword Tool
- Target your landing pages towards these specific keywords
- Include keywords in your text ads as often as possible
It’s obviously important to define the right keywords in a PPC campaign. Starting with the specific, and if necessary branching out into shorter, more general terms, will insure that you don’t quickly run out of money!