How To Choose the Right Keywords For Your Google AdWords Campaign

If you don’t choose the right keywords for your ads you’ll waste a lot of money on your AdWords campaigns. Many marketers make the mistake of placing a large number of unrelated keywords in one ad group. This means the keywords will be competing with each other for clicks. Keywords that closely match your ad copy will generate the most clicks.

How to Choose the Right Keywords

1. Think like your customer

To find the right keywords you have to think from your customer’s perspective. For example ask yourself, what is their main problem then try to address that in your ads. Start off creating a list of the main keywords a potential customer would use to do a search for your business online.

2. Use the Google Keyword Tool

Enter one of your main keywords in the Google Keyword Tool to create a list of related keywords and to see how many searches they receive each month. Don’t bother with keywords that only get a few searches because they won’t generate many clicks.

3. Keyword formats

There are 3 keyword formats:

Broad match – refers to broad search terms containing your keywords
Phrase match – refers to phrases containing your keywords
Exact match – refers to the exact keyword a person searches for

If you begin using broad match keywords in your ads make sure your ads are very specific otherwise you’ll just get tire kickers and lose a lot of money.

4. Use keyword variations

Keywords variations may include mispellings, geographically based keywords, single, plural and .com. I mention .com because many people type a website address directly into Google when searching for information ie redwidgets.com.

5. Group similar keywords together

Avoid putting all your keywords in one ad group. Instead group them into different concepts. For instance if your main keyword is “shoes” one group could be “hiking shoes” and another “running shoes.”

Enter all your ad groups containing their keywords into Excel to make them easy to manage. This will help to avoid creating duplicate keywords.

Use each keyword only once in your AdWords account. If you include the same keyword in two different ad groups, campaigns Google will only show one ad. Google won’t let you compete against yourself by showing both ads.

6. Use negative keywords

These are keywords you don’t want in your ads. They cause unwanted clicks and generate a low click through rate. For example if you were trying to get visitors to buy a product about attracting traffic to your website you don’t want people clicking on your ads who are searching for information on vehicle traffic. In this case you would add “-vehicle traffic” to your keyword list to filter out unwanted visitors.

7. Include keywords on your landing page

If visitors go to a landing page containing copy that doesn’t include the keywords used in your ads they may think they’ve arrived at the wrong destination. Make sure your ad targets the copy on your landing page otherwise you may get lots of clicks but not generate many sales.

Run your ads for at least a week to see what keywords are performing the best (receive the most clicks). Remove the ones that are under performing (receive only a few clicks) or place them in their own Ad Groups.

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