How to Find the Best Keywords for Pay per Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising only works as well as the keywords used to create and display them. If you are marketing your business or product through a PPC program like Google, there is more to achieving top ranking on the search engines and being displayed in ads across the net than how much you are paying per click. In order for a pay per click campaign to pull in successful results, you must use good keywords and those keywords must match the content of your pages.  This article focuses on using Google, but the advice is relevant to any PPC program you may use.

To my utter dismay, Google dropped the Wonder Wheel during the July redesign. The tool was wonderful for showing alternative phrasing for keywords. Fortunately, there is another free tool for finding good PPC and organic keywords. Google Insights for Search lets you search keyword phrases by the topic and displays the popularity via graph and lists. You can set the options to include global searches, or look for popular keywords by region. Look for a breakout status for the current hot words, and check for long-term popularity by looking at popularity over the last few months --- even years!

Click on the snapshot to the upper right for an example of results from Google Insights done on October 26, 2011.

This tool allows you to search keyword phrases either by the actual content of your website or by typing in phrases. For the purposes of this article, you’ll put in phrases and search for results. Because of black hat techniques such as using “bot” programs to search keywords, Google uses a “Captcha” program to verify your authenticity as a human searcher. Just type in the letters you see and hit “Get Keyword Ideas”. This tool also allows you to search for phrases that are synonyms of the words you’ve chosen.

Be careful! Unless you have a very large budget for marketing and are prepared to out-do your competitors, the keywords with the highest number of searches are not necessarily the best keyword phrases to purchase for pay per click. This is because there may be too much competition for that particular phrase, making it more difficult to obtain a top spot in sponsored results and you may get more clicks but have fewer purchases. Using a few different keyword phrases that are searched more moderately is probably your best bet for getting the best return on your pay-per-click campaign. Narrower keywords are more targeted and this will lead to more purchases through clicks. For example: The phrase “pants for men” can be narrowed to “cargo pants for men” (if indeed, you do sell cargo pants). When searchers type in “cargo pants for men” and are rewarded by a link to that particular page on your site, they will arrive there looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Use Google's Keyword Tool with Google AdWords Traffic Estimator

The traffic estimator can tell you how much you would have to pay for top PPC rankings if you were using AdWords as part of your internet marketing campaign, but it can also reveal the highest paying keywords -- making it easier for you to choose keyword phrasing for the content you target for Google AdSense.

Contrary to what you might hear or read, paying for PPC ads does not mean you do not have to pay attention to search engine optimization. Firstly, many searchers skip the sponsored ads and click on the organic search results. Secondly, Google rates PPC ads according to how relevant they are to the content on a website. This means that even those who pay the top dollar may find themselves second or third in PPC placements. To get the most out of pay-per-click, make sure the keyword phrases you use are actually part of your written content and that these are specifically related to what you are promoting.