traversing the se lifecycle

Fundamental to any successful Pay Per Click campaign is the foundation of keywords upon which it’s built. From there, ad copy, ad group organization, even campaign structures rely heavily upon the breadth and depth of your keyword research, and it’s important to make sure that you do it right. Refining your keyword reach, building out long tail terms for deep niche marketing and analyzing your competitors strategies are all fantastic ways to build a great PPC campaign. Here, we will share with you how to do some of this research so that you can get a clear idea of how your clients will find you in the paid search listings.

Identifying Core Terms

First and foremost, keyword research starts with identifying your core terms. These are the Bread and Butter of any PPC campaign, as these are the terms that capture the raison d’être (reason for being) for your site. Imagine that your site sells fruit native to Southern California. A good start would be to list all of the fruit native to California, including regional variations and even colloquial references. Next, poke around the Internet and search engines a bit to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting and consider those terms as well. The point is to build a list that you think might reflect your business in the most exhaustive way.

Once you’ve developed a list of core terms, you want to take that list and run it through any one of the many keyword tools available on the Net (like WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, NicheBot).
These tools are great for finding new keyword ideas and these tools will also give you solid information about what people are searching for. Sifting through this data will give you new ways to look at your website’s offerings. You can add keywords that are relevant to your site and prioritize your keyword selections by reviewing average search volume data.

Finalizing Your List

Now that you have your core bread-and-butter on the table, it’s time to start building out the search terms that we think will bring people to our site, the Steak and Eggs if you will. Start by going back to those colloquial references and regional terms you came up with before, and all of those terms you considered but discarded earlier. Maybe you kept “apple” as a core term, but put aside “Granny Smith” or “golden,” or considered “Northern California” or “organic” as essential, but decided they weren’t part of your core group. Now these terms can serve as modifiers to your core terms, and you can build out campaigns that include many variations of the same keyword grouping.
By identifying your core terms, using tools to build out your keyword list and finalizing your list by adding modifiers to your priority terms, you can develop a solid keyword foundation for your PPC campaign. By putting in the time to establish the right keyword foundation, you’ll be on track to maximize your ROI and get the most out of your PPC campaign.