Keyword Research

The keywords you choose to target will determine who sees your ad. You need to pick keywords that are already being used by your target audience to look for websites, products or services like yours. This may sound a little like mind reading, but it’s not as hard as you think.

First, let’s quickly go through the five key steps to picking the best keywords for your campaign:

1. If someone was using Google to look for your kind of website, product or service, what would they type into the search box?

2. What other searches could someone plausibly use? Each search, such as “low fares”, “cheap tickets” or “discount travel” is a keyword. List potential keywords to describe your product.

3. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to generate additional related keywords from your initial keyword list. We’ll walk through the Keyword Tool in-depth very soon.

4. Add and download the list of keywords that you want to use.

5. Scout your competition. In order to better understand the steps involved in creating a campaign, let’s go through a couple of examples.

Example One: ThemeForest

Our first example is ThemeForest, an online marketplace for website themes. The themes are much cheaper than a unique web design and are ideal for website owners who don’t have the time to create a design for their site, or the money to hire someone to do it for them. Aside from theme buyers, the site also tries to attract theme creators to sell their theme files in the ThemeForest marketplace. In this example we’ll set up a campaign to attract buyers of themes.

ThemeForest.net

Step 1: What is Your Audience Searching For?

 We’re hoping to attract people who want to buy website themes — in particular, “WordPress themes”, “Joomla themes” and “Drupal themes”. These are only the most basic keywords that a searcher might type into Google, but they’re a good starting point for further brainstorming.

Step 2: List Potential Keywords

Next, begin listing keywords that describe your product and are likely to appeal to your target audience. Think of as many as you can, but if you’re having trouble, three or four different keywords or phrases should be enough to get started with.

Our target market is most likely to be searching for the specific type of theme they want to find. Our example list of search phrases looks like this:

• html template

• wordpress theme

• joomla theme

• drupal theme

Note that plural versions of the above search phrases are keywords in their own right. There are many keywords whose plural version has a much higher or lower monthly search volume than the singular version. At the time of this writing, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool reports that “html template” receives 14,800 exact match searches per month (“exact match” means that only the keyword was typed into Google, with no additional words or characters), while “html templates” receives 27,100 searches per month. Never take small differences between keywords for granted. Consider the context: since searchers are looking for a selection of themes and templates, it would make sense for the plural versions to get more searches.

Now, define the objective of your Google AdWords campaign. In this case, it is to attract potential buyers who are looking for cheap, high-quality website themes and templates. If your main goal was to sell WordPress themes you’d need to tweak your keywords accordingly. Your keyword choices should always be guided by your campaign goals. Let’s make our list more specific:

• cheap html templates

• premium wordpress themes

• premium joomla templates

• best drupal themes

We’re trying to make educated guesses about how searchers would most likely express their intent. One hypothesis is that people are more likely to enter “premium wordpress themes” into Google than “high-quality wordpress themes”.

Step 3: Build Up Your Keyword List

We’re not search engines, so it can be tough to guess at the many hundreds of different search terms a person could use when looking for something like your product. Fortunately, Google has created their excellent Keyword Tool to help us. You can access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Note that the default language setting and location in the Keyword Tool is English and United States. You can change these default settings by expanding the advanced options directly above the Search button. Click the “+” sign to the left of Advanced options to reveal these options.

Change the language setting if your audience speaks more than one language. To select multiple languages or countries, hold down ‘Ctrl’ or ‘Cmd’ as you click.

One quick way to generate a list of relevant keywords is to enter the URL of your closest competitor’s site into the Website field. While this can provide you with some good keywords, they’re not

Your default language setting.

Changing the default language setting.

necessarily the ones being used to capture search traffic in the site’s AdWords campaign. The competitor’s ads might use more unique keywords than the ones that appear on the site. In fact, the keywords used to trigger the ads might not even appear in the ads themselves. The competitor might bid on the search phrase “best wordpress themes” while displaying “premium wordpress themes” in the ad copy.

The more commonly used method for generating an extensivelist of keywords is to enter your initial keywords into the Word orphrase field, then click Search

Entering keywords to check their popularity.

This book will only use this more common method. Let’s say you want to see what the search volume is like for keywords related to “cheap html templates” and “premium wordpress themes”. The screenshot below is an example of the results you’ll get after clicking Search.

The search results provide us with a wealth of useful information:

• The first column lists suggested keywords. They are sorted by relevance to the keywords you type in.

• The next column indicates advertiser competition, i.e. the amount of bidding activity, in relative values for Australia (your target market).

• The third column shows an estimate of how many Australiabased searches have been carried out for each term.

Keyword popularity results table.

• The fourth column is an estimate of the global monthly search volume for all countries and languages.

You can sort the data based on a particular column by clicking on the column’s header — the first click will sort in descending order, the second click will switch it to ascending order. You can also sort by clicking the button to the right of the Sorted by caption, which is necessary to return to sorting by Relevance (for which there’s no column header). The question mark icon next to each column header contains an explanation from Google about what that particular column means. In our case, the result shows that there are a lot of people searching for website templates in Australia and the competition among advertisers is fierce.

One useful column to add that’s not visible by default is the “Estimated Avg. CPC”. Select this by clicking the Columns button, above and to the right of the headers, then selecting the Estimated Avg. CPC checkbox followed by the Save button. The Cost Per Click not only tells you what you can expect to pay to advertise on a particular keyword, but also signifies how valuable it is to other advertisers. In this niche of website themes and templates, you should pay closer attention to the keywords with a CPC higher than $0.05, since they’re more likely to have commercial intent. If you see any keywords you like, click Add. The keyword will appear on the far right column under Selected Keywords.

Google’s suggestions for alternate keywords appears to the right.

If you add any keywords by accident, click Remove next to the keyword and it will disappear from the selected list.

Step 4: Add and Download a List of Keywords

You Want to Use After adding in all the keywords you have for “html template” or “website template”, click Download ➤ All to save the results as text, CSV (for Excel) or plain CSV (comma separated values) format . Though the demand for “website templates” is huge in Australia, the competition for this phrase is fierce. Researching more specific

Download the list in one of several formats.

keywords can help you find choices which better target traffic and have less competition. In our case, we should do a keyword analysis for “premium wordpress themes”, “premium joomla themes” and “best drupal themes” to see how their traffic and competition compares. Let’s focus on Drupal themes and templates for the moment. The phrases “drupal theme” and “drupal template” yield the following results (Fig. 2-8): while the search volume is substantially reduced, so is the level of competition. Searching for more specific keywords is a great way to find new phrases for your campaign.

Keyword results.Keyword results.

After you have completed your analysis of local traffic (in this case, from Australia), you can move on to investigating your second or third regional market.

Step 5: Checking Out the Competition

The Advertiser Competition column doesn’t tell you much. It won’t help you to find out who is advertising and what ads they are running. For this reason, it’s important to run your own Google search for your keywords and inspect the results. The results that appear under the Ads heading are your competitors.