Is it time to take your search engine marketing campaign to the next level? As I meet search marketers of all skill levels at Pay Per Click Summits around the world, everyone wants to know the secret to making the most money with Pay Per Click. You"ll want to read on to take advantage of some tested techniques to maximize your PPC investments.
Prospecting for keywords that are lower in price but still bring good results is important. To start, set up a keyword campaign and go after keywords that the competition hasn"t discovered yet. More than 500 million keywords are searched every month, yet only 15 to 20 percent have bids. These keywords will have lower volumes of search than all of the one-word and two-word options, but the conversion rates will be higher. This will minimize your monetary risk by spreading your budget over a larger number of words.
The Keyword Mining Process
You"ll want to utilize two methods in the mining process of keyword development strategies: brainstorming and research. Conduct your own informal focus group by gathering your friends, associates, relatives and others to find out how they would search for your product. Then set up these keywords into categories and write relevant titles and descriptions for each, thus minimizing the amount of time spent copywriting.
The second step in the keyword mining process involves using tools to dig for keyword variations. You can take the words your focus group has suggested and use them to expand your lists by plugging them into such keyword research tools as:
• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch)
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool (ad words.google.com/select/)
• KeywordSandbox (https://adwords.google.com/select/ KeywordSandbox)
• Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com)
• KeywordMax (www.keywordmax.com)
• Keyword Intelligence (www.keyword intelligence.com)
Taking Pay Per Click to the Next Level
Here are time-tested techniques that have worked for me and other PPC Summit trainers. Add an internal search engine to your site. This will give you information on how users are finding you and it will let you know whether users are finding what they want on your site. You can find a good search engine tool at www.freefind.com, or find others by typing "open source search engine" into any search engine.
Check out the source code on your competitors" sites and gather ideas for your brainstorming process from some of their keywords. Remember, it"s not a good idea to use the same keywords unless you offer the same product or service. Also consider your entire website. Many folks stop their keyword research on their home page. They don"t know that their internal pages can provide a wealth of new keywords. Look for all related words. Make sure you include all variations of a term ie. singular, plural, misspellings, abbreviations, etc. Remember that a "keyword" can be three or more words in length - these are the keywords that are producing higher ROI with less investment.