PPC Keyword Selection Tips

There are many important aspects to the PPC campaign that have the potential to make or break it. One of these is obviously the landing page since this is the area where the conversion either happens or does not happen: it is the last metaphorical domino to fall in a PPC campaign. Another inherently important element of a PPC campaign are the keywords you pick and use for it. How you make your campaign contextual will serve critical in getting the right traffic to view your advert – poorly targeted traffic and you will be wasting away your budget to traffic that are not interested in the contents of your campaign. For this reason, here are some tips you can use as a PPC advertiser to help you select the right keywords for a PPC campaign.
 

• Research – The first and most important step to choosing the right keywords are to make sure you have done the right and necessary amount of research into the market you are going to compete with in PPC. You need to think about how the time of the year will affect what keywords you choose (whether it is coming up to the Christmas rush or the January sales), what other adverts are already out there for the search phrases you are thinking of bidding on, and other things such as what geographical locations you are targeting whether is it global or are you looking at a specific country/area. You should know just about everything about the traffic you are targeting before you even start selecting your main keywords.
• Use niche keywords – The term ‘niche keywords’ describes keywords that are very specific – specific enough that no other advertisers have bid for them. Therefore, you are, in essence, gaining highly contextual traffic for an extremely low CPC (as there will be next to no-one bidding for that specific niche keyword phrase). Although the amount of traffic you can gain from niche keywords will be quite low, the benefits of using niche keywords makes them almost a necessity to modern PPC campaigns.
• Use negative keywords – The term ‘negative keywords’ describes the keywords you do not want to bid for and let your adverts pop up for. This will help decrease the cost of your campaign putting more of your budget to allow your advert to be viewed by contextual traffic. In essence, negative keywords are a way to make your campaign run more efficiently so your campaign targets the right type of traffic you want more of the time.

 
Ultimately, on top of the three tips above, emphasis needs to be put on the fact that keyword selection is always a work in progress in PPC – keywords that could have worked one day may not work another day. PPC keywords always need adapting and changing with the times.