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Choosing Good Keywords

Choosing good keywords that properly reflect your business is vital to the success of your Adwords campaign and in getting quality traffic to your website. Not only do good keywords mean you can write effective ads that match precisely what your potential customers are looking for, they will almost certainly reduce your Adwords costs.

Remember - high Click-Through-Rates (CTR) mean lower Cost-per-Clicks (CPC)!

More Traffic or Better Traffic?
Many people are programmed by web hype to believe they need as much traffic as they can get, regardless of its quality. It is far better though to have visitors who spend more time looking around your site because it meets their requirements.

Why have tons of people coming to your site if they will just leave after three seconds because they didn't find what they were looking for, because your ad was misleading? It's better to have fewer people - ie more targeted prospects - who are more likely to buy.

By targeting your keyphrases so they are as accurate and focused as possible, you will gain the attention of customers who are specifically searching for what you have to offer. While your unique visitor or page view count may go down, your bank account balance will likely go up!

Here are a list of things to do to help you create a great list:

1. Create a list of the terms that relate to your business - be creative and use a thesaurus. You need to be a mind reader and get into the mindset of your clients. Think like a customer. What might they search for? What are they interested in? How are they going to act on a particular search result?

Don't use single keywords as the majority of searchers use phrases rather than single words. Using phrases in their search implies that users are looking for more focused results.

2. Applicable to the Page - make sure your keywords reflect your website. While a great ad and a high CTR will bring visitors to your site, your return on investment will be nil if you have misled your visitors by using keyphrases that simply don't apply to the page.

3. Take a look at your competition - enter one of the terms you chose in Step 1 into Google in double quotes eg "website design" and look at the top three ads that are shown. Based on your top three competitors, look at their website for specific search terms being used.

Use the View Source option in your browser and look at the keywords they are using to get an idea of what they consider to be important.

They will be found in a line near the top that starts:

<META NAME="keywords" content=".......">

Add any new ones to your list. Repeat with your remaining terms.

4. Analyse your website traffic. Look in your webstats to see what keywords your visitors are using to find your site. (All Line of Site customers can do this with the comprehensive statcounter added to their websites). Again, add any new ones to your list.

5. Make sure your keywords have a narrow focus - The most common "mistake" is choosing those that are too broad, for example, 'website design'. Think about the aspects of your business that potential customers will be interested in eg 'website design costs', 'small business websites', 'low cost web design prices'. Is geographic location important? If your business will only serve Leeds for instance, add this to your terms.

Not only will highly targeted terms more closely match what your potential customers are looking for, you will find when you set up your Adwords campaign, the more targeted the keyword, the fewer the competitors, meaning the bid prices are significantly lower.

Remove any keyphrases from your list which are too broad.

6. Use Overture or Wordtracker - to further extend your keywords by entering the terms on your list and noting the results.

These tools analyse the top searches for your terms and show the number of searches in the previous month and any related keywords. Overture is free but Wordtracker has more functionality and requires a subscription (available on a daily or weekly basis). However, you can use a simplified tool from Digital Point on this site which combines limited results from both and allows you to limit Overture results to the UK.

Add any new phrases which are appropriate to your business to your list.

7. Check your list for duplication. Use the Keyword Optimiser from SEOChat which will automatically remove duplicates and reorder your terms alphabetically. Save in Notepad in readiness for use in your campaign.

8. Make a list of negative words - words which if added to your keyphrases do not specifically relate to your business eg 'free', 'courses', 'jobs'. Save this in Notepad also.

If you follow these tips you will have a comprehensive list of keywords which properly reflect your business.

Your next step is to create an Adwords campaign...

See:
How do I set up an Adwords campaign?
Adwords: how do I write a good ad?