Player's Guide - Lesson 3

"Keyword Research Basics"

Lesson:[1][2][3][4][5][6] 

Welcome back for another lesson :-) Remember, we're building a very strong foundation in these first few lessons, so that when I teach you the more advanced "stuff" later on, you'll be able to truly grasp and use the concepts. So let's get started on today's lesson...

Successful PPC campaigns are based on three things:

• Focused Keyword Research
• Compelling Ads
• Effective Landing Pages

In the next three lessons (Lessons 3 to 5) I'll pick up each of these topics and give you mini-tutorials on doing the best in each aspect of your ad campaign.

Today, we start with keyword research. It basically boils down to two steps – finding a profitable topic and then using keyword databases and PPC engines to create lists of keywords around that topic.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get started.

How to Find Profitable Topics

Information that helps readers take an action is always more valuable than information that helps your readers think. In marketing terms, that means that your target market is people who are looking to buy / acquire something and are looking for ways to do so. It's what we call the ‘end of the buying cycle' – your best chance at getting your prospect to buy something is right before he makes a purchase.

When you are looking at topics, you can use the metrics mentioned below as a means to judge whether a topic is worth pursuing or not, but when you are doing keyword research, make sure that you target those keywords that prospects will be searching for when they are collecting information that will help them make a positive / negative buying decision.

An easy way to determine the profitability of a topic is to measure it by the ‘PPC metrics' which are – Popularity, Price, and Competition.

Popularity

In crude terms, the more popular the topic is the more clicks you will get on your ads and the more chances you will have of converting those prospects into customers. Higher popularity means more profits for you. On the other hand, popular topics are already very competitive (in most cases), so you have to analyze it from all sides.

Low-popularity topics can also turn good profits, so just because a topic does not get 100,000 searches a month does not mean you shouldn't go near it. The key is to match all three factors – popularity, price and competition – before making a decision to target that market.

Price

The price of the product you are promoting will determine your profit margins. With high-priced products you can afford to spend more money per click, and that's mainly why you see such outrageous bids for terms like real estate, insurance, lawyers and pharmaceuticals – they can afford it because making a couple of sales gives them huge profit margins.

On the other hand, with products with a low price point you will have trouble going overboard with your bidding, and you will need to be very careful with what you're willing to pay. In such a case, keyword research becomes even more important as you absolutely must find those keywords that you can target cheaply.

Competition

What is your competition like? Heavy bidding will suggest one of two things – either the market is lucrative enough to risk investing so much money (back to the ‘price point' discussion above) or there is someone trying to price their competition out of the market. In either case, you wouldn't want to spend too much money at the start, so this step will give you an idea of whether you can enter a niche without getting totally burned.

Another point to consider is that if there is low competition for a topic, you have to figure out why that is. Is it because the niche isn't well known? Are people having trouble ‘selling' in this market? Or are they targeting the ‘wrong' market?

How To Do Keyword Research

Once you have a topic (see previous section for more on this), you can quickly run it through the following steps to judge its profitability and create a focused list of keywords.

For this walkthrough, we will continue with our earlier topic – home theater systems. Specifically, we will be doing keyword research to do three things for this topic:

• Use the keyword databases to find out if it is popular
• Research the PPC engines and find out what the top bid prices are
• Go back to the keyword databases and create a focused list of keywords

Step 1 – Popularity Check

Just as we did in the previous lesson, head to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture).

As it's shown below, enter your main keyword in the box and click on ‘Go'. This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.

( http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ )

Copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step.

Alternatively, you could use the same keyword list you made earlier.

Step 2 – Bid Price Check

Most people will tell you to go to the Yahoo Bid Tool and see their numbers to get an idea of what the top bids are. It's a good idea, but why not go to Google instead and use the tools THEY have provided to us inside the Google AdWords account? This way we get to see numbers for Google AdWords (where we will be bidding), and not some other PPC engine.

You've already signed up for a Google AdWords account in the last lesson, it's time to put it to use.

Login to your Google AdWords account (https://adwords.google.com/select).

Within your account, go to Tools > Traffic Estimator (or just visit the link below) to launch Google AdWords' traffic and bid cost estimation tool.

(https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox)

Enter your keywords as above in the first box (don't worry about broad, phrase, exact and negative matches for now – we will cover these in Lesson 6). These keywords will be the ones you copied off into a text file in the previous step.

Next select the maximum cost-per-click that you're willing to pay, as well as your daily budget. Since we are going for maximum clicks here (top ad position, unlimited budget), we will leave these empty because in that case Google automatically selects values that give you max clicks daily.

Scroll down.

Language and location targeting will be set to your default account values, so you can leave them as they are.

Enter countries that you want to target – Here, I've selected US and Canada .

When you're done, click on ‘Continue' and you'll be taken to the next page with the Traffic Estimator's results.

This screen above is very helpful because it will give you a good estimate as to how much the top Adwords bidders are paying "per click" for each of the keywords you entered. Also, you'll be able to see roughly how many clicks you can expect to get "per day" if you were in a certain ad position in Google. And finally, you'll be able to see roughly how much you could expect to pay "per day" for each of the keywords.

These are some VERY helpful numbers.

At first glance, this seems a very expensive niche to get in. With most of the keyword phrases costing over $2.00 a click to be in one of the top 3 Adwords positions.

Now $2.00 a click is a high amount – at a 1% conversion rate (1 out of 100 people clicking through your ad convert into customers), that means that you will need to spend $200 per sale!

But... when you think about the niche, you'll realise that most home theater systems go for thousands of dollars – even a pair of high-end speakers can set you back $500. Add to that the fact that you can improve conversion rates by following simple tips (Lesson 5) and suddenly this niche looks very, very interesting.

You'll also notice that most clicks go to a few keywords – these are the ones you will be shaping your ad groups around. Adwords is all a numbers game. No your metrics (how much a customer is worth to you) and you'll be a step ahead of the competition.

Now that we know that this niche can deliver, let's look at how we can create focused keyword lists around this topic.

Step 3 – Creating Keyword Lists for Sub-Topics

Once you've put together this list, go back to the Keyword Selector tool and enter the second keyword into the search box - that is, enter 'wireless home theater system' in the search box this time, and press the arrow to generate a new keyword list.

What are we doing here?

The best strategy to choose keywords here is to start off with your parent term, pick up the top terms from its list, and then ‘drill down' to find more keywords for those terms.

For example, with home theater system as our parent term, we see in the screenshot above that we have lots of targeted keywords for that term. You also see that terms like home theater sound system, wireless home theater and home theater system design are ‘different' from the parent keyword and are subtopics that could be used to create more focused keyword lists. Not only that, they are also getting quite a number of searches themselves, so it's worth targeting that traffic specifically (as opposed to running general ads).

So for each term that is a "subtopic" (you have to use your judgement here) and has a lot of searches, you should run it again through the Keyword Selector tool and create a list for that term as well.

For each subtopic, create separate lists. By the way, you can keep these lists in simple text files - no need for fancy spreadsheets or anything like that - you don't that yet.

At the end of this process you will probably have around 100-200 strong keywords on 4-5 subtopics (and 1 parent topic). That's a good number to start with.

Congratulations – now you're ready to write ads and get the ball rolling.

If this is your first time doing keyword research, don't worry – it gets easier with practice, and there are tons of tips and shortcuts you can use (that we will see in lessons 7 and beyond) to drastically cut down your time in this.

In the next lesson, we will see how you can use these lists to write ads that attract clicks .

All the best,

Brad Callen
PPC Marketer
http://www.keywordelite.com