Keyword Research for AdWords for Novices

When you initially start off with PPC, you should stick to a modest number of keywords. Thousands-word keyword lists should be left to the PPC marketer with greater experience. A newbie should utilise roughly 100 focused keywords in their campaign; anything more will be too difficult to manage. Large keyword campaigns will drain your money account if you can't harness their power. There are a few basic free ways you may use to identify low-competition focused key phrases. Google and Excel are two methods for locating low-competition niche keywords. You should utilise Google's keyword tool in particular; simply put this into Google and it will display in the search results.

When you arrive to the main Google keyword tool page, you will see a white box (field) where you may enter your specific term (s). Enter one term for the time being to get a sense of how this works, and then hit enter. After hitting enter, you'll be sent to a list of keywords that are closely connected to the one you input. Scroll to the middle of the page, where the line Add all 150 is highlighted in blue bold lettering, for the sake of what we want to accomplish. Below these terms are the phrases download all keywords with text,.csv (for excel), and.csv. You want to select.csv (for excel). You will export this data by doing so.

Once the data is on the excel spread sheet, you can do some basic analysis that will greatly improve your PPC campaign. There will be data columns A-D in the excel spreadsheet. The columns will be, in alphabetical order, Keywords, Advertiser competition, previous month's search volume, and average search volume. We're interested in two columns: advertising competitiveness and average search volume. What we want to do is combine the data from these two columns to get a number with which we can operate. So we need to take a generalised average of these two numbers to produce a figure that we can compare to a predefined benchmark. Sounds.The greater the number, the more the competition (as shown by advertising competition numbers) and the greater the search traffic (as expressed by the average search volume). Ideally, we want minimal competition with a large search volume so that we may target low-cost, high-converting keywords. So, in order to locate these terms, we employ a broad benchmark number that determines their competitiveness and volume level. If the terms surpass the standard, we leave them alone; if they are close to or below the benchmark, we want to catch them and incorporate them in our PPC campaign.

We'll take an average of the advertising competition column and the average search volume column to generate our results, which we'll compare to a predefined benchmark. This is something we'd want to perform for all of the keywords that have been exported to an excel file. And we achieve this by entering a simple command into Excel and duplicating it throughout the appropriate boxes. To begin, locate box E2, which should be blank; this is the first box to the right of the first number in the average search volume box.

So, you want to type=average into this blank field (D2,B2). When you shut that last row, this will automatically calculate the average of those two figures in this E column row). To receive all the averages for each term, simply click on that box (E2) and pull down on the box while holding the right click. When you pull down to the last box, the boxes should fill up with colour (nothing will be in them yet). Then, once you've coloured in all of the boxes up to the last one, pull your finger off the right click. When you do this, all of the averages will be displayed in the boxes. You literally just copied the function from the top to the bottom.

A decent benchmark average is at around.50. This will provide us with a respectable amount of competitiveness as well as a high search traffic. As a result, we compare these averages against anything with a value of.50 or less. Anything above.60 we want to avoid at first since it will most likely be too expensive to bid on. Now, compare all of the averages in column E to the preset benchmark of.50. We want to save everything that goes below.50 or.55 (to perhaps gather some more data). Copy all of the terms that fit this criterion into a notepad.txt file. (There are faster methods to do this, but they require some mastery of Excel capabilities you may not be familiar with.

So now we want to take the terms that fell below or near the benchmark and enter them into the Google keyword tool. Now go through the exact procedure we just went through to acquire the keywords we just entered into the Google keyword tool. You'll want to take the average of the two columns described above again, then obtain the averages of all the keywords by dragging the first box down, and compare to a benchmark of.50 or.55. But now that we've discovered some more specific keywords to work with (as a consequence of the first exporting of data to excel and collecting averages to compare against the benchmark), we're ready to go.