- The majority of your advertising will use keywords
as the primary method for attracting customers
and keywords are words or phrases
that are used to match your ads
with the terms people are searching for.
These will be the true foundation of your campaigns.
So selecting high quality relevant keywords
for your campaigns is critical.
Now, a big mistake that you'll want to avoid
is making the assumption that keywords
that mean roughly the same thing will perform the same.
Let's say you're in the preowned vehicle business.
This might be an industry term
but if you're selling to a typical consumer,
well, they're not using that language.
They'll be searching for used cars
and that keyword preowned vehicles
is not the same keyword as used cars.
There are about 600 times the number of searches
on the term used cars over preowned vehicles.
So there is a huge advantage
to using the language that your customers are already using.
The airline industry is a another great example.
They might reference low fares in their marketing language
but in reality, customers are talking
about discounted flights or cheap flights.
So as you go about researching keywords,
you want to be sure that you're speaking the language
of your customer.
Now, the best advertising is specific.
So instead of pushing our message to the masses,
we want to push our ads out to those very specific people
that we know are interested in what we have to offer
and if we know that our personas
are say teenagers using slang or jargon
then we need to focus on using slang or jargon
in our keywords.
Now, to arrive at great keywords,
the first step is to think like your customer.
Imagine what they're searching for.
These are the terms that you're going to use.
Think of specific search words for each category
of product or service that you have available
and use personas to get in your customer's head.
Remember, you want to know how they're thinking
about that product or service.
Now, the second tip is to organize by theme.
Group all of your keywords into tightly connected themes
and as you look at that list of themes,
see if you can break them up into sub-themes
and again, the more thematic, the more group things are,
the better results that you'll have.
So if you have an ad group for say men's boots,
you would want to get more granular
and create themed keywords
such as men's rain boots, men's work boots,
men's motorcycle boots, men's fashion boots and so on.
In fact, you might even find yourself
grouping those into their own deeper themes.
And finally, be specific.
A generalized keyword
is going to get you irrelevant matches.
Boots would be a bad keyword in general
because it has no context.
People that are typing in boots
might be looking for boots for themselves, for their dog
or Boots, the pharmacy in the UK.
So it's better to be specific
and get about five to 20 keywords per ad group
and most importantly, just take your time.
Keywords are one of the most important elements
in your Google Ads process.