Your Keyword Strategy is the lifeblood of your Google AdWord Campaign.
Every successful AdWord Search campaign will consist of proper keyword planning. In order to show your ads in the search result, you will have to target and bid on specific keywords in your industry.
Google’s keyword planner is an excellent starting point, but depending on one tool alone can lead to missed opportunities, particularly in today’s intensely competitive landscape.
Google Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is a free Google Ads tool that is used to search for keywords and see how a list of keywords might perform. It can help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns. One of the reasons why it’s the best starting point is because it helps to start your research in keyword even without any knowledge.
When you fire up the keyword planner, you can enter topics and phrases or even URLs from your own site (or others). Google will then create ideas for you. To access Keyword Planner:
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- In the upper right corner, under the tool icon, in the sub-menu “Planning,” click Keyword Planner.
Once you open the Google Keyword Planner, you can enter phrases or topics or even URLs from your own site (or others). Then, click Get started to get new keyword ideas and historical statistics, like average monthly searches or competition data.
Metrics
You will next a list of potential keywords for your campaign along with some metrics for every potential keyword. But which keyword research metrics should I be considering? Isn’t search volume sufficient? Let’s explore.
- Average monthly searches: The average number of times people have searched for a keyword and its close variants. By default, the average is based on a term of 12-month period. It’s recommended to choose the keyword with exact match type for a more precise representation of search volume for a keyword.
It’s best to manually average the last 12 months of search volumes, rather than relying on Google’s provided 12-month average. Note that the search volume changes over time. It would make sense to invest in keywords that have high volumes for a period of time.
Don’t just select high volume keywords. You will end up paying for high traffic for a few numbers of clicks. You will need a balance of high and low for your campaign. A small volume keyword might drive more leads to your website. Having a mix of both will give you specificity and tons of traffic that you can remarket.
- Competition: The number of advertisers that showed on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. This value is often misused as a metric for indicating the difficulty of ranking. Generally, most keywords with higher average monthly searches will have more competition. However, this may not be true in many cases. High competition can also lead to fewer sales.
- Top of the page bid (low and high): These are the amounts of money you need to bid (per click) on each keyword to be at the top of the first page or the bottom of the first page. The lower range bid is an approximation of the 20th percentile and the higher range bid is an approximation of the 80th percentile—that advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top of page bid. This will give you an idea of what you can expect to spend on keywords.
- Organic impression share: What percentage of the clicks on the search term is organic or paid? It’s calculated by dividing the number of web searches that showed a listing from your website by the total number of searches for that keyword idea. Certain keywords may have high organic impression share. It means that the ad shows up in the result but end up getting a few clicks. You can improve traffic by improving your sites SEO.
- Organic average position: If you rank organically for these terms, this will be a valuable metric. This is calculated by taking the average top position of your listing (or multiple listings) for each web search for a particular keyword.
Note: To see your organic impression share and organic average position, you need to connect your Search Console account with the Google Ads account. Historical stats like average monthly searches are only shown for exact match.
All the above metrics have to be analyzed based on your geography and Search Network settings. The results can vary greatly based on the same. When keywords are closer to the bottom of your funnel, you can expect more direct conversions without the need for remarketing.
Good Practices
- Align your business goal and campaign objectives: Think holistically about how customers could reach you and understand the intent behind each keyword. Different keywords will have different purposes and an objective to accomplish. Remove negative keywords. As yourself, if the campaign is meant to drive new sales or just traffic?
- Keyword match types: Use the broad match to capture long tail queries, reserve exact match for your primary volume and value drivers. Always have the right mix of high and low volume keywords. Note that regardless of how many ads that you have been running on a single keyword, Google will show only one on each search results page. This means that if you have similar or identical keywords in different ad groups or campaigns, your keywords are competing against each other. Don’t create minute variations of phrase/exact match keywords. Break down your keyword ideas to see their impact on specific segments like by mobile device and location.
- Targeting: Use Dynamic Search Ads to streamline account management. This will help you avoid the need for continual updates to your keyword lists every time you make a change to your site. Also, ensure that the campaigns are targeted to the right target segment. Maximize the presence of your existing keywords by improving their Ad Rank. An aggressive bid tied with higher quality ads can drive volume on existing keywords
Other Tools to consider:
After compiling the list of potential keywords using the Google Keyword Planner, you can also try some other tools on the market that can provide a better idea about your campaign.
KeywordTool.io
Keyword Tool is a free online keyword research instrument that uses Google Autocomplete to generate many relevant long-tail keywords for any topic. The free version of Keyword Tool can generate up to 750+ keywords from Google autocomplete in seconds. The advanced version Keyword Tool Pro, provides on average two times more keywords in comparison to the free version and offers a handful of other useful features.
WordStream
WordSteam provides comprehensive and accurate keyword suggestions, search volume and competitive data, making it a great alternative to the Google Keyword Planner.
The tool will help you find high-volume, low-competition keywords for your AdWord campaign. It will also help find keywords for your website. You can also get long-tail keyword queries that are less costly to bid on and easier to rank for. Some other keywords include Negative keywords, Meta keywords, PPC keywords and SEO keywords.
SEMRush
SEMRush has a keyword tool that is driven by its huge dataset of search data from 26 different countries. SEMRush results return keyword ideas, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, keyword difficulty score, and current ranking domains for a keyword.
Moz
Moz has a keyword tool that can help you select keywords from nearly any location in the globe. Keyword results include related query ideas alongside estimated search volume and a keyword difficulty score. Moz also shows domains currently ranking for the keyword and recent mentions of the keyword.