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Strategies For Preparing PPC Keyword List Building

In my last article, Zen And The Art Of PPC: A Five Step Holistic Approach, I introduced some of the most important elements of a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. These elements include keyword research, bidding, ad copy writing, landing page copy writing, and overall Web usability and tracking. Today I would like to concentrate on some strategies to develop your initial PPC keyword list.
Words Words Words / Location Location Location

Any successful restaurateur can tell you location is one of the most important factors in achieving a successful business. The location determines the amount of foot traffic that a restaurant will be exposed to. In the same way, the cornerstone of any successful PPC marketing campaign is your list of keywords. Your choice of keywords will determine the quality and quantity of visitors to your ads and website
Just say NO to client keyword lists

Often, during my initial meeting with a new PPC client, I am handed a list of keywords that the client requests to get ranked. They usually go on to explain that they must have keyword XXX because this keyword is the only one capable of driving business, they’ve seen their competitor bidding a lot of money for #1, and they are not interested in spending any of their marketing budget on any other keywords. Unless they are really adamant on handing me this list, I usually politely decline. Why? The problem with accepting a client’s list of keywords is that you are basically limiting yourself to their pre-conceived notions of what words would drive them traffic.
Derive the keywords from the business model.

My approach is to have a detailed conversation with the client first and try to nail down all of their main products and services that their business has to offer. Once I have a clear understanding of their business, their products and their services I can start to put together a list of words related to their products and service. After I finish my own list, I can compare it to theirs and in most cases my list is much more expansive. Companies who offer both products and services often advertise their products but neglect to market their services. In many cases the PPC keywords associated with products are more often more expensive than words associated with their services, so it is important to always consider services that companies offer in addition to products that they sell.
Sample questions to ask your client (or yourself if you are doing PPC for your own business):

What are the core products that you sell?
What are the core services that you offer?
How do you distinguish your products from your competitors?
How do you distinguish your services?
What industries are you involved with currently?
What industries would you like to get involved with?
What marketing material do you have addressing your products and services?
How do customers usually find out about your business?
Keywords that a customer would use

The goal of all PPC campaigns is obviously to drive more customers to a website, so you should try to think from the perspective of the customer. Ask yourself what words a potential customer would type into the search engines. For example, let’s say company A is an industrial manufacturer of stainless steel wastebaskets. If I were a customer, what words would I type into Google, Yahoo or MSN to find this company?

Stainless steel trash can
Metal trash can
Kitchen trash can

Or if you were a purchasing agent for a large company, you may type in other words such as:

Commercial trash cans
Commercial waste containers
Lobby trash cans
Public trash containers
Keyword Stemming

Stemming involves the interchanging of singular and plural forms of a keyword or the derivation of a verb from the gerund form (the “-ing” word). For example, if “educate” was part of a keyword phrase, “educated”, “educates”, “education” and “educating” should also be considered.
Local Words

If your client’s business depends on a certain location, then by all means try stemming with the location’s name. For example La Jolla surfboards, Southern California surfboards, etc. These words can be what we call the “gold between the cracks”. These could be less expensive PPC words that are high quality, high converting words.
Keyword Software Assistance

After growing your list to about 50 words you can then take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available for generating keywords. I particularly like using the Google keyword tool, Overture and Wordtracker. By using these three keyword tools I go on to expand the list to about 100+ keywords with various combinations
Conclusion

Generating your initial keyword list for PPC should be a well- thought out process. It is a critical step in a successful PPC campaign and should not be rushed. Spend time to ask your peers, your friends, etc. about what words they would think about if they were looking for the products and services that you or your client offers. Lastly, resist the temptation to use the software to do all of your work. The more words you have in your initial list, the more you can generate with the software tools.

In my next article, I’ll go in depth on how to organize and categorize your keywords into various market category words and some simple bidding strategies.

About the Author
Simon Dang is a Director of PPC Search Marketing at Business Online, http://www.BusinessOL.com. Business Online provides customized website solutions to help plan, build and grow your business online. Our solutions include Website design, Search Engine Marketing, PPC Marketing, Website Usability and more.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Starting a new business is a whirlwind of responsibility. It all starts with an idea, but balloons quickly into so many other things, especially after you’ve got it all together and you’re waiting for that first customer to walk through the door or onto your website. So how do you get the word out about your new business? The answer lies in pay per click marketing.

Pay per click Marketing is the business start-up’s dream for advertising. It requires just a small investment up front, and after that you only pay for the ads which go to people who want to know about your business. These are people who’ve searched for something online and clicked on your ad next to search results or content they located in their search for information. Pay per click marketing is the perfect way to spread the word to the people who are the most likely to actually spend money with you.

Pay per click marketing may sound like a big, fancy job you need someone with credentials to fill. However, you can run your own pay per click marketing campaign easily from your own home or office without much training beforehand.

Pay Per Click Marketing: Where to Start

To begin your pay per click marketing campaign, start by analyzing your market. Who is your target customer? Who is most likely to use your product or service? After you figure out who your customer will be, then you can start deciding which keywords you want to target. The keywords should be words your target audience would type into a search window whenever they’re looking for information related to your business.

Start by thinking about what words most people say when they’re describing your business. You don’t want to get too fancy or exact when choosing keywords, or your ads won’t show up in online searches. You also don’t want to stay too general with your keywords, or you’ll have ads showing up in places where there’s no value for you to have them.

Pay Per Click Marketing: Advanced Skills

The final step in your pay per click marketing campaign is to set up your ads. It’s important to choose a pay per click system that works best for you and your business. Most pay per click services allow you to organize your marketing campaign around geographic locations. This is one of the most important aspects of any pay per click marketing campaign because about half of all online searches are people looking for local results.

After you’ve got your ads set up, take some time to think about all the extras. For example, how does your website look? Do people glance at it and then click off it immediately? How long does the average visitor spend on your website?

One interesting feature eClickZ has available to its pay per click marketers is the search box feature. These days most websites have a search box which allows visitors to look for specific things on that website. There’s so much information on the internet these days that those search boxes have become almost necessary for some websites. Instead of building your own search box into your website, why not let your Pay Per Click service like eClickZ place one on your website? By doing it this way you also let them pay you by becoming an affiliate, in addition to being an advertiser.

Pay Per Click Marketing: Staying On Top of Things

Finally, it’s always important to stay on top of your pay per click marketing campaign. Monitor how well your keywords do in internet searches and be prepared to make changes. Watch the numbers and track them constantly through your pay per click service. Before you sign up for any pay per click service, make sure the reports those services use are easy to understand. Those reports will be full of numbers and graphs, but if you don’t understand what they say, you can’t run a successful pay per click marketing campaign.

The numbers from your pay per click service show you exactly how many people use the keywords you’re targeting, and how many of those people actually click on your ads. All pay per click marketing systems will give you a click-through rate at the end of the day, and this click-through rate shows how well customers are receiving your ads.

Lower click-through rates mean people see your ads but aren’t clicking on them. It’s always a good idea to research the click-through rates of any pay per click marketing services you consider. EClickZ, for one, has a very high click-through rate, which means the system they use to locate the best places for your ads works better than some other pay per click marketing systems.

Pay Per Click Advertising In A Nutshell

Pay per click advertising is an amazing system that’s been around since the late 1990’s. It basically allows advertisers to generate a ton of web traffic through search engines. Have you ever noticed those helpful sites that show up as “sponsored sites” next to your list of search results? Those sponsored sites are pay per click advertisers, and they only pay for those ads when you click on them.

Today’s consumer looks to the internet to find out more about various products and services. Because of how web-savvy today’s consumer is, Pay per click advertising provides the perfect opportunity to direct interested parties to your website. It’s practically perfect! You only pay for the ads potential customers click on, which means your pay per click advertising only reaches those who are truly interested in your business. You give them the opportunity to learn about your business by putting your ads out there, and then you only pay the ads which actually compel people to click on them. After all, people who don’t click on your ad most likely won’t become your customers anyway, so why pay to advertise to them?

Pay Per Click Advertising: Click-Through Rates

One of the most important things to consider when you’re choosing a company to set up your Pay Per Click advertising through is the company’s click-through rate. The click-through rate is basically the ratio of people who actually click on the ads listed by that company.

One pay per click service which has a phenomenal click-through rate is eClickZ. What makes eClickZ pay off even better for pay per click advertising is the Return-on-Investment guarantee. The average cost per click is much lower with eClickZ, so that, paired with the high click-through rate means you’ll get a lot of exposure in exactly the right places.

A high click-through rate shows you two things about the service you’ve chosen. As an advertiser, it shows you that the service makes good choices when pairing your ads with search results and other content. For publishers a higher click-through rate simply means more money.

Pay Per Click Advertising: Fraudulent Clicks

As with most good things in life, there’s always a risk for fraud, but a good pay per click service will have something in place to protect you from fraudulent clicks. There are a lot of bots and other computer traffic on the World Wide Web that aren’t actually attached to a human being. Computers around the world are constantly accessing data on the internet, which can leave you with a huge bill for clicks that don’t have a chance to generate business for you.

When you’re considering which pay per click service to go with for your business, always check out the fraud protection first. For example, eClickZ uses its own system called ClickWatcher. It’s a fraud detection and prevention system which filters out robot traffic, repeated clicks from the same IP address in a 24-hour period, and even clicks from non-English speaking countries. Pay per click advertising is all about exposure to people who are actually interested in your product, and you don’t get that exposure with these kinds of clicks. That’s why a good pay per click service will make sure you don’t pay for them.

Pay Per Click Advertising: Distribution Systems

Another thing to check out when you’re looking for a pay per click advertising service is their distribution system. You want to find a pay per click service which give you exposure right where you need it. After all, an ad for kitty litter probably won’t draw much traffic if it ends up next to content or search results that are about auto repair. A good pay per click advertising service will have a solid system for deciding which ads end up where.

You also want to make sure your ads reach customers who can actually purchase from you. If you only ship to addresses in the United States, it does you no good for your ad to be seen by people in the United Kingdom. EClickZ uses a special marketing tool which carefully calculates the best locations for your ads. From there, the pay per click advertising service distributes your ads to over 1,800 search sites, coordinated specifically by the information you enter into the system when you set up your pay per click advertising campaign.

Most Pay per click advertising companies like eClickZ allow you to pay by bidding on keywords or choosing a flat rate per click. Whichever way you decide to go, you’re sure to get a great return on your pay per click advertising investment if you choose a great service to run your campaign.

Cost Per Click Advertising

Now that you’ve begun your pay per click campaign, it’s time to start looking deeper to see where you can bring in more customers and make some extra cash. Cost per click advertising is all about real, factual numbers in your pay per click advertising campaign. As a business owner, you undoubtedly have an idea about which words people will use when searching for information related to your product or service. It make take a week or so however, to discover if the words you think people use to search for your business are, in fact, the words they actually use.

For example, if you run a pet washing business, and you set up your pay per click advertising campaign around the keywords “pet washing,” you may discover that you’re a bit off base. A better pay per click campaign might focus on “pet washing,” but also “dog washing,” “cat washing,” “gerbil washing” and whatever other kinds of pets you wash at your business. Of course all keywords are completely regional, so one set of keywords which works well in one part of the country may not be the words they’re using in another part of the country. The bottom line is that you must know your customer and how he or she speaks if you want to draw them into your website. Cost per click advertising will show you if you do indeed know how they speak.

Cost Per Click Advertising: Transforming Traffic into Business

Your return-on-investment is also very important in cost per click advertising, so whichever pay per click service you use, be sure it’s one that has a solid, proven system to match your ads with search results and content. EClickz is one pay per click service which boasts both a high return-on-investment and a high click-through rate. These two factors add up to more clicks for you and, if your cost per click advertising campaign is set up correctly, a high amount of paying customers tracking to your website.

Cost per click advertising will show you whether the people who end up visiting your site through your pay per click campaign actually end up buying from you. If your keywords are too generic, you won’t be pulling in the right kind of customers to your website. Cost per click advertising is all about instant feedback on your ad campaign.

Cost Per Click Advertising: Analyzing Your Numbers

So how can you use the numbers from cost per click advertising to help you interpret how your pay per click ad campaign is going? Most pay per click services allow you to set bid amounts for your keywords. Basically, you agree to pay somewhere in a certain range on a cost per click basis. The higher your bid on a keyword is, the higher up in the search results your website will be. You can utilize cost per click advertising by changing the ranges of your bids on various keywords. Bid higher on one set of keywords for a couple of days, and then look at your reporting data to see how those keywords did for you. Then lower your bid on that set of keywords and raise your bid on a different set of keywords. You shouldn’t have to adjust your bids on various sets of keywords for too long before you start to see a trend of which keywords work the best.

As soon as you start to see a trend in which keywords pull in the most traffic, then you can really start to hone in on which keywords you want to have the highest bid on in your cost per click advertising campaign. After you have your web traffic up to a healthy level, then you can start seeing how many of the clicks you get actually turn into a customer spending money with you. A cost per click advertising campaign which draws in huge amounts of traffic which never spends money isn’t worth much of anything to any business owner.

Cost per click advertising is all about studying online human nature habits. You’ll pay for any ads as soon as someone clicks on them, so it’s important to make those clicks count. Spending a dollar for someone to spend 10 bucks with you is a huge gain, but if you’re spending a dollar and not getting anyone to buy from you, there’s something wrong. It may be the keywords you’re bidding on, or it may even be your website. Just spend some time figuring out what the problem is, and then you’ll be soaring high on the wings of cost per click advertising.



Pay Per Click Search Engines

Any time you embark on a journey to learn more about Pay Per Click Marketing, the first thing you should do is research your search engines. There are so many Pay Per Click Search Engines, and many of them are perfect for different things. If you want to choose the right search engine to help with your Pay Per Click endeavor, you’ve got to learn the benefits and challenges of each one.

Pay Per Click search engines are all about advertising through keywords. You want your website to be full of the words people use to search for websites about your specific topic. Choose your keywords carefully and do your research about them before you set up your account on any Pay Per Click search engine. Those keywords are what people will use to find your site, and if you don’t choose the right ones, your web page will not show up in search results. In the beginning, it doesn’t matter what your Pay Per Click ad campaign looks like if you don’t choose the right keywords.

Pay Per Click Search Engines: eClickZ

One Pay Per Click service that offers a lot of value for your money is eClickZ. All you need to do is research which keywords you want to pay for advertising on, enter your bid amount on eClickZ, and you’re on your way to pulling in thousands of visitors through Pay Per Click search engines. You can even use a “publisher” implementation on your site if that style suits you best.

But however you set up your Pay Per Click ad campaign, you’ll get real time results right at your fingertips. If you’re just getting into using Pay Per Click search engines in your ad campaigns, the real time reporting results will show you immediately if you’ve paid to post your ads with the correct keywords.

Pay Per Click Search Engines: How it Works

So what’s the key to finding new customers? More and more people are turning to the internet to find out the best way to do things. They search a topic that interests them, and the search engines return a list of websites. Some of those websites will get people to click on them, and some won’t. If you pay to have your business listed with the keywords most people use when thinking about your industry, then you can pay to have your ads show up on those searches. But with Pay Per Click search engines, you don’t pay for that ad until someone clicks on it.

For example, a $100 deposit gets you started on eClickZ. From there, you pick the keywords you want to advertise with, and then adjust your bid rates for those keywords. EClickZ uses the adCenter PPC system for bids. This system allows you to set a maximum bid for your entire campaign and a daily budget caps. Every business must have a budget set for advertising, and eClickZ makes it easy for you to stay within that budget without a whole lot of monitoring. The Pay Per Click system does it all for you after you set the parameters for your Pay Per Click ad campaign.

eClickZ also makes it easy for you to set your Targeting Max cost-per-click. This means you’re setting a maximum you want to pay for clicks to a particular targeting item. Once again, since this entire ad campaign is Pay Per Click, you don’t pay for the ad until someone clicks on it.

Pay Per Click Search Engines: The Benefits

Using Pay Per Click search engines is the perfect way to guarantee that only potential customers see your ads. You don’t pay for random internet searchers to see your ads. If you go with eClickZ, you can pay as little as five cents per click, or as much as a dollar, or even more. If you find a certain keyword search really hauls in the customers who click, then you’ll want to bid more on that particular keyword.

Another thing about eClickZ that is especially nice is the Return on Investment guarantee. The Pay Per Click search engine boasts a lower than average cost per click, which means you get much more value for your money. This higher value truly makes eClickZ the leader in Pay Per Click search engines.

There are so many things to learn about Pay Per Click search engines before you begin your ad campaign. It can seem overwhelming, but once you start on your way, you’ll find your ads picking up a lot of clicks before you know it.