The High Importance of Keywords for PPC

Tuesday, July 7, 2015
When you use Google to search for something, you type words into the search box to find out about it. Google returns results relevant to the words in the search box. For businesses that want ads to show up on the result page have to bid on that word (keyword).
For better results at PPC, it is important to bid on the right keywords. There are a few parts to focus on:
PPC Keyword Research - use analytics data and keyword research to find a list of your business relevant keywords. The aim is for your business website to show up when people search with the keywords.
Keyword Grouping and Organization - Organizing of keywords into tightly related keywords groups for an effective PPC account.
Negative Keywords - By setting Negative keywords, you can filter out unwanted clicks not related to your ads.
Keyword Bid Optimization - Focus your spending on the best performing keywords, thus saving on your budget without paying more.
To get high ad rankings at a low cost, it is necessary to work at achieving relevance across your account. These include:
· To have an organized account structure
· To have compelling, targeted ads, and
· To have optimized landing pages
The presence of these factors determine your keyword Quality Score - the key metric that is responsible for the number of ad clicks you get and the amount you pay for the ad click.
Keywords vs. Search Queries:
Although, the terms "keyword" and "search query" are often taken to mean the same, but actually there is a difference in meaning.
A keyword is an extrapolated abstraction from the multiple search queries.
On the other hand, a search query is the actual word(s) that a user types into the search box.
Search marketers work with keywords.
The Importance of Keyword Grouping:
For better PPC marketing, it is important to group keywords into related clusters. You can create more relevant, Quality Score-friendly ad groups, landing pages and text ads by effectively grouping and organizing keywords as part of improving your PPC strategy.
You can do this by using a keyword grouping tool to split a list of keywords into smaller groups and further breaking them into even smaller groups, thus forming a tree structure.
How Keywords Work in Your PPC Ads:
It is important that your text ads are relevant to the keywords you are bidding on for better Quality Scores. This is the metric that determines the appearance of your ad and your cost per click (CPC). Your ad should include the keyword to show its relevancy to both the Searcher and Google. You can make your ad "light up" by using bold font term multiple times in your ads.
Some tips for using keywords in your PPC ads:
· Use the keyword in the headline and once more in the description lines, while still communicating your message and including a call-to-action.
· The long-tail keywords have less competition and hence worth bidding on, as they are more targeted and less costly.
· A good option is to use dynamic keyword insertion, in which the exact search query is inserted into your ad, thus increasing its relevancy.
· Make use of sitelinks with more related keywords for expansion of your ads.
Keyword Match Types:
When biding on keywords, you have four options to tell Google how the search engine should match your ads against relevant search queries. The options available are:
Broad match - This is the default match type. The matching of an ad is done against the greatest possible queries.
Modified broad match - With this match, your ad is only displayed when one or more words are in the search query, but preventing synonym matches.
Phrase match - This match type lets you display your ad only when a full query is present as a full phrase in the search query (The words must appear in that order.) Other words could be there before or after the phrase.
Exact match - It is the most restrictive match type, and matches your ads to queries word for word, as your keyword.
The advantage of broad match keywords allows you with the maximum number of impressions and clicks, but those clicks are less targeted and the chances of conversions may be less. The more restrictive is the matching, the fewer clicks will be there, but that traffic is more relevant and more qualified.