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The Most Common Mistake of Conducting Keyword Research, and How to Avoid Them
Both before and after you start a PPC campaign, it is important to perform an effective keyword research. The keywords you use will determine whether the traffic coming to your website ends up being profitable or costing you money without conversions to sales. In many cases using generic keywords with high volume searches can be very costly in the world of PPC. It is more effective to use long-tail, specific phrases, which will bring your site better qualified traffic at a lower price. As for SEO, it's even more crucial to use the right keywords in the beginning, because it is harder to backtrack after you have already started your SEO work. For those reasons, your keyword list is the most important building block of successful PPC and SEO campaigns. The question is how do you build a high-value keyword list? What's the most effective way to discover these keywords? That is what we're going to cover in this mini-course. Let's get started. The Common Mistakes Ok, to illustrate this, let's use an example. You're selling wedding favors online. You want to build your keyword list for your PPC campaign, so you go to your favorite keyword tool and start punching in "wedding favors" and you get:
At this point, you have all 300+ keyword variations of wedding favors—all of which receive decent traffic. For the next few hours you’ll start grouping and writing ad copy for them i.e: winter group, garden group, beach group etc. You finally launch your campaign, anticipating a flood of traffic and sales. Sounds good right? Not really... The problem with this approach is that all of the keywords are from the same root keyword: "wedding favors.” By doing the keyword search above, you went “deep” into the long tail. That is good, but not good enough. Finding longer phrase variations of one root keyword is what's called going Deep. This is the MOST common mistake people make when doing their keyword research... they ONLY go deep. Go "Wide" then go "Deep" To discover your profitable niche, you need to go "Wide" AND THEN go "Deep". Going wide means that you need to get inside the mind of your potential customer and think like them. Let's get back to the example above. What else do brides think when they're thinking about wedding favors? Some example:
Notice that none of these keywords contain your root keyword “Wedding favors” Here are some ideas to build your wide keywords category
So, before you begin thinking of and gathering a long list of keywords, first write down the various categories of products or services you will be promoting on your website. This is called going “wide.” Once you come up with the list of categories, THEN you go "Deep" on each of them. Here's why you need to go wide before going deep:
The Keyword Tool You Can’t Live Without Now, to come up with these adjacent terms/categories (to go wide) and long list of keywords (to go deep) requires some thought, and that's why you need helpful tools. In today’s world of the internet, where information is abundant and speed is the name of the game, you need to know how to utilize technology to stay on top of your business. In fact, our entire modern world is only possible because we can automate many things by using the right tools. Google Wonder Wheel Google recently released a new feature called “Google Wonder Wheel.” Google Wonder Wheel is a wheel (of wonder), which shows search terms related to the current searched query, allowing you to explore relevant search terms you might not have thought about, or been able to search for. It gives you more information than previous search tools. Google Wonder Wheel is, by definition, a wheel display of relevant search terms. How can you start using the Wonder Wheel? To get to the Wonder Wheel, all you need to do is perform a keyword search in Google. Once Google returns the search results, go to the top left corner of the page. Under the word "Google," click on the term "Show options," and you will see a list of clickable options. One of the options "Wonder Wheel". Click on it, and you will see the wheel expand your original search terms and display other highly relevant search terms. Clicking on one of the search terms will open a new wheel of relevant search terms, and so on. This Google Wonder Wheel for related search terms is not new, as these terms have always and still do appear at the bottom of the search screen. However, the Wonder Wheel is definitely a nice way to display the results and help refine your search to be more specific, and useful. We decided to use the wheel to help us go wide in our keyword search when building our campaign. In this scenario, we are looking to establish different categories for the “Anti aging product.” By using the Wonder Wheel and clicking the related keywords to expand the wheel, we were able to come up with the following related categories for anti aging products very quickly. Categories of Anti Aging products :
Keyword Tools Now that you have built the categories, it is time to start going deep on each category of your keywords. Below is a sample of the keywords that we came up with by using the keyword tool to go deep on each keyword category. Watch the Video to see how we did it. You will see how much time we are going to save you and eliminate the process creating numerous spreadsheets and using all kind of different keyword tools.
Thinning and Adjusting At this stage, you should have an exhaustive list of relevant keywords. Now is the time to weed through this list. Remove any keywords that are simply too generic to be profitable. Using the example we provided, basic keywords such as "skincare,” "anti aging" etc., may need to be removed. Also, make sure that no keyword is repeated twice. If you use the same phrase in two separate AdGroups this will cause a conflict and you will have little to no control over which AdGroup the phrase will be active. Watch the video, as I am going to show you how you can use the iSpionage keyword tool to filter out bad keyword phrases and separate your keywords into specific AdGroups. Watch the video below, as I am going to show you how you can gather a long list of highly targeted keywords and group them in to Ad
groups using iSpionage’s keyword and campaign builder tool. Summary By creating relevant categories and using iSpionage’s keyword tool, you should be able to gather a strong base of keywords for your PPC campaigns. General keywords such as "skincare" can become extremely costly and unproductive, so do not forget to try various long-tail and specific keywords. There are many other factors in having a productive PPC campaign, including ad copy, landing pages, conversion tracking etc, but without a solid base of keywords your PPC campaign may be dead in the water before it even sets sail. For SEO, these tightly related keyword groups should be used to create your category pages, content, articles, blog post, and backlinks anchor text. These keywords are highly relevant to each other, thus in the eyes of the search engine, your site will look like the natural authority in this niche. Before going full-throttle with major SEO work, we recommend that you work on your PPC campaign first, test it, look at the results, and refine. As a final note: imagine yourself as a fisherman, and your goal is to find the best fishing spot of the day. To do so, you need to cast your net as wide as possible, and see if you get any good fish. If you don’t, you can cast your net on the other side of your boat, or move your boat, and so on. In search marketing, the profitable keyword is your fish. You need to master the process for finding them. It's very rare that you get it right the first time. You will have to practice, and refine your technique before the process will work best for your business. But, you will become a great search marketer in the long-run, and your business will grow once you master this skill. With iSpionage you will be able to hone that skillset in an efficient manner. iSpionage end-to-end solution provides you with:
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As you probably know, search marketing is the most effective way to drive
targeted traffic to your web site. There are two major types of search marketing
that a business owner can do: paid search advertising (PPC) and organic search
(SEO).