Evolving Technology: How to do simple keyword research for Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Our tech expert shares his advice on conducting a successful PPC campaign

The most important task in a successful PPC campaign is keyword research.

Choosing the right keywords to bid on means you’ll generate relevant clicks that lead to conversions and avoid wasting your money with searchers who don’t want your products or services.

Search intent

It’s important to consider the actual intent behind a user’s search query. Are they sat, money in hand, ready to buy?

Are they just doing casual research? Are they looking for your opening hours, or are they comparing your prices to a competitor?

As you pay every time someone clicks on your ad, ideally, you’ll only be showing your PPC ads to people who are looking to make a purchase.

How to find keywords

To find a list of keywords, I would recommend starting with the website landing page that your ads will link to. Scan the page and pick out the relevant terms from the text – this should give you an initial list of keywords that directly relate to your product or service.

You can add to that list by considering the answers to a few questions:

What phrases best describe my product or service?
When people are looking for a product I provide, what will they type into a search engine?
Who are my competitors, and what terms might they be targeting?
Google Keyword Planner

Now you have an initial list of keywords, you can use data to determine if they’re the right terms for you, expand the list, and choose which keywords to actually bid on.

Google Keyword Planner has all sorts of benefits to help you with your keyword research:

It can show you what people are actually typing into Google, and the volume of these searches per month.
If you don’t know exactly what people are calling your products, type a few options into the ‘get search volume and forecasts’ tool and compare.
It can suggest additional keywords to add into your list that are also relevant.
You can see a keyword’s ‘competition’ rank – high, medium, or low. A high competition rating means that more advertisers are bidding on these terms, and it could cost you more to appear for it.
Create a negative
keyword list
It’s essential to create a negative keyword list during your research.
This helps to prevent your ads from showing up for search queries that are irrelevant, offensive or when the searcher doesn’t have the intention of buying.

Common negative keywords include: