Your keyword list is the backbone of all your Pay Per Click campaigns. You need to properly source and research relevant keywords for your market. Develop a good long list. Go deep and go wide, by that I mean explore every avenue and every avenue off every avenue etc. etc.
Here’s a brief example of how to expand your lists by exploring related
avenues. For this example I’ll use mortgage as the root keyword.
Mortgage is a very competitive keyword because the commissions are very good.
So how do you get in on the action without paying through the nose?
Create your first list open Notepad and get pasting keywords. Think of different ways your prospect can interpret mortgage e.g. best loan, buy house, bad credit mortgage, no status loan, home finance, house purchase finance etc. This really is only marginally removed from the main keywords you should dig deeper still.
Open another Notepad document and next try expanding into types of mortgage – interest only, flexible etc. Now take these open a third Notepad and mix them up with your first list as you do this you’ll find avenues of keyword clusters present themselves from single keywords e.g. flexible home finance, interest only house loan, best flexible mortgage etc.
Here’s another avenue to explore. You could set up an Ad group focused entirely on mortgage company names take that further still and add a .com to the name or a co.uk or your own countries extension e.g. www.somemortgagecompany.com . Open up another Notepad document for this.
It doesn’t matter if this domain doesn’t exist, people type these in to Google so it’s possible you can pick up very low cost traffic with these keywords.
Broadly speaking stay clear of the general keywords and dig a little deeper expand on related terms or, here’s a good one, rephrase those terms. To briefly go back to our example above ‘best flexible mortgage’ could also be entered as ‘best mortgage flexible’ or ‘flexible best mortgage’ or even ‘mortgage flexible best’ you get the idea. Better open another Notepad for these.
Put yourself in your prospects shoes. What would they search for? How would they type it into Google?
Now for even more ideas, check out these keyword goldmines –
|
Keyword type
|
Example
|
| Spelling errors |
widjet |
| Plurals |
|
| Typo’s |
widgte |
| Hyphens instead of spaces |
buy-widget |
| No spaces between the phrase words |
buywidget |
| Existing domain names |
greatwidgets.com |
| US or UK spelling |
coloured widgets |
| Add .com or .net or .info etc. |
buywidget.com |
| Product names |
sony widget |
| Product numbers |
widget wg11 |
| Serial numbers |
wg11 123 |
| Company names |
great widgets limited |
| Company domain names |
greatwidgetslimited.com |
| Domain names and variations |
widget.com, www.widget |
| Competition sites Meta data, body copy or their name |
This is pretty straight forward |
| Foreign words
widgiet |
widgiet |
| Add superlatives |
best widget, great widget |
Be sure to separate out all these keywords in to different lists in a number of Notepad documents. You will be setting up different ad groups for each. It’s important to not simply drop them all into one campaign together. I will be explaining more about this in another post.
Try combinations of words both forward and backwards e.g. buy widget, widget buy.
Check your site Log files, they’re a great source of information on your site visitors and they’ll tell you what keywords people used to find you.
Try regional targeting; think of different words phrases for describing a region e.g. New York, east coast. Try long lists of more regional (town, city, state, province) words e.g. buy car New York, Canadian life insurance etc then go back to the top and try spelling errors, no spaces, plurals etc on these. Read magazines or sites relating to your market or the market you are promoting, look for industry jargon or buzz words you could utilize.
Try searches for your main keywords on the search engines and see what related terms pop up. Check the Meta tags on your competitor’s site. Check the copy on your competitor’s site.
Ok back to those keyword lists. I mention advertising on brand names above, Google is getting stricter on advertising on company brand names e.g. you can’t use ebay in your keyword list and you haven’t been able to do for sometime now. But as things stand it’s not quiet closed off entirely but it’s not far off. Just be aware of this.
A fantastic way to explore those keyword avenues mentioned earlier is to utilize a thesaurus. Here is a link to a great thesaurus resource - http://dictionary.reference.com.
Going back to my mortgage example. A quick thesaurus search on mortgage gives me -
balance, bond, capital outlay, continuance, debenture, extension, instalment plan, lien, loan, mortgage, on account, on tick, plastic, respite, securities, stock, surplus cash, tab, trust, wealth.
Not all entirely useful but I could expand on instalment and build a collection of words around that e.g. low mortgage instalments, mortgage instalment table, mortgage instalment payments.
Do you see where this is going?
I trust that gives you an idea of the power of going deep and wide on your keyword list building.
OK so you’ve got your lists. Now what?
You now need to further qualify your customers by adding negative keywords to your campaigns e.g. if you are selling a product you don’t want people clicking on your ad looking for something free, or keywords that may qualify your ads for a product you’re not selling e.g. digital camera case.
Case is no good if you’re only selling cameras. You can easily add negative qualifiers right across your campaigns now. This is pretty straightforward and I won’t go into detail here.
Most of all when creating your keyword lists BE CREATIVE there are over 200 million searches on Google everyday and people have their own idiosyncrasies. They WILL NOT always search for the most obvious terms related to your business. In fact I came across statistics from Google recently that stated a surprisingly high number of search terms entered in to the search engine are unique and have never been entered before!! Even with over 200 million searches a day.
OK that’s it for now. This is a fairly long post but it has to be, keyword sourcing is the backbone of any good PPC campaign. Without a good keyword list you’ll get nowhere. 
In the next post I’ll go into more depth on how to organize the lists of keywords you create into ad groups and then we’ll get right into the Adwords system and I’ll explain the fundamentals of setting up a campaign, before I move onto some stunning tips for Ad writing.
Be ready to stomp on your competition.
Read My Full Review Of CopyNProfit And Grab Your Bonus (Only 15 Available)