AdWords Success: Keyword Research & Marketing Tips & Techniques

Know Your Market & What They Want/Need Now

Market research is something a lot of marketers avoid. As a result, this is an area where you can gain an advantage. The goal is to dig deep into you target market and uncover what their greatest needs are. This is not easy and it is time consuming but could be the single most important thing you can do to succeed and make sales. Find forums, chat rooms, the group sites (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc). Lurk, interact and pay attention until you start to see recurring questions and problems. Those are the things you are going to use in your content within your ad campaigns.

Make Sure Your Product or Service Provides the EXACT Solution to These Problems/Questions

Once you know what your market wants, give them exactly what they're looking/asking for. How do you do this? Either find a product through an affiliate network, drop ship arrangement/distributor or create the product yourself. That's right, create it yourself. This most commonly takes the form of an eBook and can be a lot more lucrative than you think. You can even get someone else to write it for you.

Do Intense RELEVANT Keyword Research

It is extremely important that you build a very targeted keyword list that contains relevant terms what your audience is looking for. I know this sounds obvious but many new marketers choose broad keywords thinking traffic is king. That doesn't mean squat (except for tons of adspend with no conversions). Look into more terms with less traffic but that are more targeted. Very important.

Be 100% Sure Your Content Is Also Relevant

This is important with regards to Google and will impact the costs of your AdWords marketing efforts. Since Google looks over the page that your ads are landing on to check for relevance (whether the keywords in your ad appear on the page as well), you want to make sure the content on the page is closely related to your ad. If not, your minimum bids will be very high and your keywords inactive.

Monitor Your Performance

AdWords Marketing is not "set and forget". Test. Test. Test. Make every attempt to improve on what is working and dump the ads and keywords that don't. Split test with multiple ads and landing pages. Try to get better Quality Scores from Google to reduce ad costs and increase positioning at the same time. This is a never ending process but it is essential for success.

If you are starting out with AdWords or need help fine tuning and increasing your performance, there are a few resources you can use that are well worth the time, effort and cost. I read and use these resources constantly and they have had a BIG impact on my success and in helping me gain an edge and avoid a lot of pitfalls:

Google Money Pro 2 - This AdWords course is written by a Google Certified Advertising Professional and is a very in depth manual on using AdWords effectively and profitably. The live login to his Clickbank account showing profit reports is worth a look even if you're not interested in the course.

Beating Adwords - This manual was written by the owners of Wealthy Affiliate, an online internet marketing community. This course has some of the best info out there on targeting and relevance. Valuable resource.

Keyword Elite - This is the most incredible keyword research tool out there. It is my only keyword research tool (I also have a Wordtracker subscription that is used inside Keyword Elite as well). This program not only allows you to build targeted, extensive keyword lists fast, it has other data related to competition that is second to none. Great way to gain an edge. It also interacts directly with your Google AdWords account so you can create ads (and compare them against your competitors) and upload them right into a new campaign. Check out the videos on their site.

You will hear me mention these products on this lens in a lot of my posts. Out of the TONS of material out there (many of which I have purchased and subsequently used as bird cage liner), these resources and materials have been the most useful and have added to my bottom line. I think they can do the same for you. If new tools and services become available, I will review them on this lens.

Hope this information has been useful. Until next time....

First launch the Google Keyword Tool.

Next, choose "Site-Related Keywords" and enter in the URL of your landing page and hit GO.

You will likely notice several groups broken down by specific keywords that Google has selected from the page.

Next, add all the keywords to the right side of the page by hitting "add" and export them as a text file using the link below your list. This should open up in Notepad.

Next, keeping that text file open, go back to the Google Keyword Tool main page. This time select the "Keyword Variations" tab.

Next, copy and paste your keyword terms in the text box (make sure there is one keyword term per line). Hit Go.

Now you will see another big list of keywords related to your original list. Add the ones that you want to use to the right hand of the page.

Repeat this process until you're blue in the face and have exhausted all RELEVANT keyword options. These should all be quite relevent now however because you started with actual terms from your landing page.

(if you want to make this list bigger, you can triple it by using each of Google's match types on this list. You can find a tool to help you with this here.)

Google now loves you.

Keyword Research for Google AdWords or other Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns requires a great deal of time compiling lists and analyzing data and for me involved several different tools. For people like me who deal with PPC on a daily basis, anything that can reduce the time it takes to research keywords and arrive at an effective list is a welcome addition.

In the search for a comprehensive tool that could handle all of the tasks that are performed during keyword research, I came across several options beyond just the free tools offered by Google, Yahoo! and others (these tools are great but lack a lot of important competitive analysis and filtering tools). Other paid options were looked at as well such as Nichebot , Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker (which I find useful in certain situations). Having had some bad reliability "incidents" with hosted software, I personally tend to stay away from those solutions.

Knowing what it takes to research keywords in a comprehensive and ultimately profitable way, I decided to use the following criteria for the tool I was interested in finding:

A) Must be able to research keywords on all relevant search engines for a complete keyword profile

B) Must compile as much data on competition as possible including, at the very least: KEI, Number of Searches, Number of competing sites, and Average Cost Per Click for each position.

C) Must be able to research keywords on ALL Google match types (broad, phrase, exact).

D) Must have outstanding sorting capability for the large amounts of keywords that I work with and the ability to quickly filter out unwanted keywords from the results.

E) Must NOT be a hosted application (software as a service). As I mentioned above, if my bottom line is directly affected by my ability to research keywords, I don't want to have to rely on hosting to allow my software to work (if my connection goes down it's the same issue but there's always a Starbuck's open for wifi).

Knowing what the Google results looked like for "keyword research tools", I turned to my fellow AdWords marketers for suggestions. The one that came up over and over again was Keyword Elite sold by Brad Callen, a well know SEO and search marketing professional.

Right off the bat I was assaulted by ad copy right on the front page of the site. Not good. Ironically, I don't' care much for sites like this but since the recommendations were from people I trusted I wound up checking out the video demonstrations. That's when I decided to pick up a copy. Even if it's not the right product for you, I recommend watching these short videos as a way to streamline your own keyword research process.

With regards to the criteria above, this is how Keyword Elite stacked up:

A) Variety of Search Options

Google, Yahoo!, Ask and even Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery (this does a free WT keyword search but you can add your paid login credentials for a more thorough search which is something I also recommend).

B) Quality of Keyword Research Data

Keyword Elite surpassed my expectations here. The data that can be used for competitive and cost analysis is outstanding. KEI, Results/Searches Ratio, CPC, Estimated Clicks, Number of Active Campaigns. It does this across Google, Yahoo!, Miva and Enhance. What really impressed me however is that the software goes one step further. It actually allows you to monitor your competitor's ads with time stamping, view those ads, the sites they point to AND how well optimized that page is for certain keywords (if you know how competitive search marketing is, you know how immensely valuable this particular feature is).

C) Search All Match Types

Keyword Elite will not only search these formats for you, it can also format your keyword lists (1000's of entries) with the parentheses and brackets for "phrase" and "exact" match with one click. This is a significant time saver if you've ever done this by hand (there are other online tools that can accomplish this too I have since found out, but it requires a separate tool. I prefer all tools in one package).

D) Flexible Sorting Capabilities

When you research keywords, you want all the time savers you can get. Keyword Elite delivers here with some flexible and easy to use sorting. Alphabetical, Word Counts, User text input are all available. Filter results you don't want by simply typing them in (free, etc). Show keywords that only contain a certain phrase. Eliminate unwanted characters. Append additional words to your entire lists quickly (buy, purchase, join, etc).

I want to mention here the exporting you can do with these results in Keyword Elite. Most programs allow you kick out a text file of your words. This software goes a step further and allows you to actually create your ad groups and ads right from the interface and upload them directly to your Google AdWords account. You don't even have to open a browser and navigate the Google AdWords process to create these things. You also have the ability to pull up the top ads right into the editor to see what your competition is using. Very powerful.

E) Software Installs Locally (Not browser based)

When you research keywords, you need access at all times. You never know when a campaign is going to need to be tweaked. Depending on which keyword research tool you use, hosted applications may not be able to handle transactions under heavy load causing slow response times (or no connectivity at all) .

Side note: If You use AdSense...

An interesting feature of Keyword Elite (though not related to researching keywords) is the ability to create AdSense web pages with only a few clicks. Keyword Elite will allow you to grab free articles from one of the aggregator's and instantly format it in a ready to go AdSense page. Google doesn't appreciate this too much but the functionality is there.

Conclusion

To sum things up, Keyword Elite has fundamentally changed the way I approach keyword research. Not only has it cut down the time it takes to research keywords, it has provided me with a competitive edge from the data and results it provides. It has a bit of a higher price point than other tools but once you purchase, there are no other costs and, comparatively, it costs about half of a year's subscription to Wordtracker.

My one wish for improvement with this software would be its underlying structure. It is a modular build in that all functions run independently. Keyword Elite has help alleviate this somewhat by using "right click" menus to add selected results to the next part of the research phase. A small quirk that in my opinion, is more than offset by other unique and powerful tools.

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