More Like this My Searches Articles : Guide to Google Adwords - Best Practices Part 2

Age : 45 Joined : 08 Mar 2008 Posts : 1850

Adwords Best Practice number 2:

Research, Research, Research.

The extra time you spend planning your campaign will pay dividends in the future by providing targeted visitors at a fraction of the price.

3 Steps to Great Keyword Research.

Step 1 : Brainstorming.

This step is the ONLY step most people carry out and even then they don't spend the time it needs. Get a pen & paper and try to think of all the words people may use to search for your product and service.

For example one of our clients sells sweets online. During brainstorming some of the ideas we came up with were "sweets", "traditional sweets", "old fashioned sweets" and "jars of sweets".

Don't stop at the general terms however. By breaking it down even more you can break it down to categories e.g. "Sugar Free Sweets" and "Chocolate Sweets" or even down to product "Sherbert Lemons" etc.

Once you get going you should be able to think of a healthy looking list full of variations.

Step 2 : Keyword Tools.

Brainstorming is a great start but you need to carry out research to find out exactly how many people are using certain terms and more importantly how much competition is attached to your terms (more on this in future articles).

The Google Keywords tool can be accessed from with your AdWords account and you can find the Yahoo! Search Marketing tool here:

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/

One of the best research tools available is Wordtracker. Wordtracker not only shows you the number of people searching but also offer data regarding growth, competion and much more. I would recommend you invest in Wordtracker if you're serious about Internet Marketing and PPC.

Wordtracker - Take your Free Trial

Get all these tools in your Internet Marketers Toolbox.

Step 3 : Beating the Competition

There are many tactics to get 1 UP over your competition. One of the most common is spelling mistakes. By bidding on spelling mistakes you can achieve clicks for far less than the correctly spelt terms that all your Competition is bidding on. People do make typos all the time while browsing.

We'll go through all the tactics in future posts. Keep working on your keyword research and you'll get a refined list of words that really works for you and your business.

Keep informed via RSS as number 3 will be here soon.