How To Choose Effective (PPC) Keywords For Your Website

Work on algorithm in the vintage computer lab

How To Choose Effective (PPC) Keywords For Your Website

When you’re using keyword marketing to optimize your site, you can run into a lot of frustrating situations. Despite your best efforts, it’s possible that the keywords you select are just not generat- ing the traffic that you need. On the other hand, sometimes keywords that work well in the begin- ning will just stop working. You can tell when this happens because the numbers associated with your keywords (assuming you’re using a metrics program to track them) drop without warning or explanation.


Many things can happen to make your keywords quit being as effective as they were in the past. And many times you didn’t do anything at all to make this happen. That’s why it’s essential to regularly develop concepts, test, and implement new keywords for your PPC programs and for your web site.


Creating your first keyword list


The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, improve your conversion rate, and make yourself visible to search engines could easily give you a serious tension headache. Even using some of the techniques that have been discussed in this chapter to find the right keywords and perfect your methods of research take time. It’s not something that you can just jump into today and be successful at before the sun sets. It’s far more successful if you start slowly and build your way to greater success.


You already know that you must first create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorming and asking customers are two ways to build that list. You can also include all of the keywords that are sug- gested by keyword suggestion tools, and you might even consider pulling out a thesaurus to find additional words and phrases that you haven’t considered. Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers and avoid broad or generic terms that are so all-encompassing they apply to every site that’s even remotely related to yours. These words are incredibly difficult to rank high with and won’t drive quality traffic to your site. Instead, focus on words that are relevant but not overly used, and always keep your eyes open for those words that are very specific but highly targeted to your site or offerings.


When creating your first keyword list, include all of the words that you can come up with. This part of selecting your keywords and phrases is actually easy. You can include everything and don’t have to worry about the quality of what you’re including until later. Unfortunately, because it is so easy to create this first list, many people make the assumption that PPC marketing is easy. This first step may be, but it does get much harder as you research and qualify words and phrases and then work those words and phrases into PPC marketing programs.


Keywords and phrases will need constant revision, so you should always be creating that “first” keyword list. Keep a running list of words that will apply to your site. Each time something is changed on the site, or something changes in the field that you’re in, you’ll have to go through all of these steps again. If you are not constantly testing, analyzing, adding to, and removing nonper- forming keywords and phrases as appropriate, you’ll find that PPC programs that worked really well in the beginning lose effectiveness over time.


You’d better believe that your competition will be constantly monitoring and revising their keyword and PPC strategies. And if you’re not regularly taking advantage of all your keyword resources, you might as well hand over your customer lists to your competition, because they’re going to end up with all of your customers anyway.


Keywords are what draw potential customers to your web site. These potential customers are either visitors who are ready to buy now or they’re browsers whom you can motivate into making a purchase or reaching a goal conversion that you’ve established. So remember that when you’re building your initial keyword list, you’re using a little educated guessing to get started in reaching highly qualified site visitors. Later, you can rely on specific keyword-related tools and analysis to replace your educated guesses with more concrete keywords and phrases that will help you reach your goals.

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