Keyword Best Practices for PPC Advertising

The keyword is the heavyweight champion to PPC, high rankings, and high click-through ads. He is what makes your ad valuable to others. He knows how to please the crowd and will do so within seconds of hearing the bell. He knows how to move like a butterfly and sting like a bee, providing quality content quickly. And lastly, he has big time endorsers - Google and Microsoft.

As discussed previously, the keyword value in website optimization bears the heaviest weight for search engines. To be blunt, search engines love keywords so much that they’re willing to dance with them, even when links and widgets are in the room. It’s wonderful to deal with keywords that have thousands of searches a day, or even hundreds, but in reality, these “popular” search terms make up far less of the searches performed on the web. It’s important to have more, long-tailed keywords that are specific to what your customer is searching for. Below are a few best practices you should keep in mind for PPC campaigns:

• Group. Keywords lay the groundwork for the ad groups and ads you create. You should group them into lists of similar items, such as product line. Each grouping should make up individual ad groups so that you can write multiple ads that coincide with the groupings. This will also allow your keywords to run along a single theme. For example, organize keywords about organic tomato sauce in one ad group and keywords relating to homemade tomato sauce in the other.

• Match. Broader matching options tend to give you more impressions, but accrue higher costs. It’s important to monitor broad matched keywords to make sure they are performing effectively. Phrase and exact match keywords are more effective in getting quality clicks with higher CTR’s. These more narrow matching options can provide you with lower costs, but it’s still important to include descriptive words with these matching options. Negative matches can ensure terms don’t get shown when they don’t apply to your business.

• Scrub and Refine. Set aside a few hours every month to scrub and refine your campaigns. Keep specific keywords that relate best to your product or service. Remove keywords that are irrelevant or are likely to bring you the least amount of traffic. Well-targeted keywords generally have higher CTR’s and conversion rates. Two- or three-word phrases generally work best, and you should consider removing any one word phrases because they are usually too broad to accumulate an effective CTR.