Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Choosing Your PPC Keywords

By Brian Basch

Good keywords can be compared to a good tagline. They are both equally important for the success of your advertising campaign. Your keywords are in effect the base of your PPC advertising campaign. If you choose weak keywords they will cause your campaign to fail, however strong ones can make your campaign soar.

In order to make a good keyword list you will need to make sure you do your research. Drill down and look into every likely keyword carefully. You can then choose the very best keywords for your campaign.

To give you a clear idea on how to expand your list, we will provide you with an example. In this example, the base keyword "real estate" has been taken as the base keyword.

Because of high commissions "Real Estate" is a very saturated word on the Internet.

Your initial step will be to compile a list. Think of the many keywords your potential customers might use, when they think about the base keyword. Take our example "Real Estate," searchers can use alternatives such as; investment property, real property etc. These keywords are just the tip of the iceberg as they are quite similar to the base word. This means that you should search a little more.

After this you will dig down into the different specialty markets of real estate. For example; commercial real estate and boarding houses etc. Then you will mix these sets of keywords and generate new ones.

Real estate company names can form the basis of a separate campaign. Add .com to your regional extension. Do not worry if it is a domain that is nonexistent, searchers sometimes experiment with these types of keywords and you will get the chance to get some of these clients at a lower cost.

Never use general keywords; use specific keywords to attract the target market. When you are thinking of a keyword then try looking at it from your client's point of view for best results.

Here are some points to note:

- You can add a .com or .net etc to your keyword.

- You can capture visitors with company and domain names.

- Enhancing keywords with words like; best and cheap can be added to your keywords.

- You can check out your site log files; they will tell you what words and phrases your clients use.

- You can glance over the copy on your competitor's site.

Make sure to separate all these keywords into different lists. Place all the typos in one ad group, the plurals in another and similarly go on with the rest. This will lead to easy targeting of your ad.

Go ahead and make long lists of keywords with the help of the information provided in this article. With the right keywords there will be nothing standing in the way of your success. So build and cement your PPC campaign with a strong foundation of effective keywords. All the Best! - 15359

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