Find a good Keyword with Adwords

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Find a good Keyword with Adwords

Mon, 03/02/2009 - 07:46 | admin

Here are some tips how to find a good keyword on Google Adwords which has decent search volume, but not that much competition.

Accessing the Tool for Finding our Keyword

The Adwords tool can either accessed from withing your account, or,if you dont have an account external via this link http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Now from the menu start out selecting "tools" in your account, the tool comes up and you can enter some search phrase. In our example we used "bonsai".

You will also notice that the "match type" for the keyword is set to "broad". The broad match would just fit for too many search terms, and without going more into detail i recommend to ONLY use "phrase" matching or even "exact" matching. and do not start out using broad, especially when you are a beginner with adwords.

So..switch to "phrase", and you can also try to do some "brainstorming" and tip common phrases into the search box and let google give you suggestions. For example, we type "to grow bonsai".

Then switch around between "phrase" and "exact"...and here in this example you see it comes up with some phrases like "how to grow a bonsai tree" and similar...and the bids are also rather low, with pretty decent 1300 searches/month. Those keywords, 1000+ searches per month and barely $0.20 CPC are definitly GOOD!!

"Longtail Words" are good

As a rule of thumb: the longer your keyword in adwords eg. "how to grow a bonsai tree", and the "tighter" your match type, the more target your searches are, the less competition you have.

The CPC is a rough indicator how "saturated" a market is.

Now, using the google tool, this just asks for experiments. Always use the results for getting ideas, and also feel free to re-run the tool again and again with new combinations, say, enter "buy bonsai tree", "where to get bonsai", "bonsai tree garden"and things like that.

Use phrase matching exlusively, or exact matching. Look at the CPC columns and the traffic columns. If it says "not enough data", the search volume is not enough, so just ignore those results. You want a search volume of say, 500-1000 per month, and very little CPC, the least possible which should be approx $0.05 or EU0.05 respective.

Now, what you need to know, that all those numbers are still only averages, and they can differ sometimes. But with the tool you can get a rough overview which word has a good search volume, you can get an idea about the competition and what costs to expect. Especially the CPC can be way off sometimes.

As a rule, the CPC cost for phrase "some phrase" and exact [this is exact] matches keyword are usually way lower than the broader search terms.

Now, if you start your PPC campaign, you make sure you have the usual "negative" words on campaign level already. I use negatives like -free, -rapidshare, -gratis, -torrent, -crack, -scam to eliminiate a lot of garbage traffic.

If you start out, you put your keyword in the the adgroup for your ads and use only PHRASE matching like "some phrase" , observe the adgroup for a while. You can add [exact] matches later, if desired.

This is, by far, NOT a guide for complete research by all means, but the tool is very good for brainstorming and it still gives the best rough estimates, compared to other solutions. Why? Because you are using Google as a direct source while other solutions and tools often use "second tier" search engines and rather estimate their numbers, so Google comes closest when it comes to numbers.

Be specific with your phrases

Many adwords newbies make the mistakes to only use very generic broad terms like "make money" or "gardening", and using such brute-force research methods you can spend lots of money in very short time and your traffic will be very, very untargeted. The more specific you are, the more targeted, the more likely it is that a visitor to your site is also a potential buyer.

It can be more profitable to go with a very specific phrase if your site can deliver to the visitor. Instead of featuring a site "Recipes" you can go for "BBQ Chicken Recipes" or "Chicken Pot Pie Recipe", divide your site into subcategories and make multiple ads leading to sub-categories of your site.

You can as well select many "micro niches" with very specific "long tail" keywords, each maybe only 200 searches a month, but if you add a multiude of such words it will add up and be more proftibale then blindly targeting too generic terms.