Organising keywords, as far as PPC (pay per click advertising) is concerned, can be broken down into three parts.
1. Find suitable keywords 2. Use them correctly in your Google ads 3. Control the whole thing with pay per click management software
By the time we get to part three we will need software to manage our PPC campaign and there is nothing finer than the wonderful Ad Grenade.
For now we will focus on how to find a suitable list of keyword phrases to use in your ppc campaign - at zero cost !
Both ‘Keyword Tool External’ from Google and the first class Traffic Travis are free and do a first class job.
If you are not too experienced in internet marketing and/or money is tight, I would recommend sticking with the free tools to begin with.
How To Compile A Large list Of Relevant Keywords - FREE
To begin with, compile a list of obvious phrases from your niche, for example ‘grow roses’, ‘how to grow roses’, ‘how to grow climbing roses’, ‘how to grow hardy roses’ etc. Another free tip, enter your phrases into the Google search box and see if the dropdown menu comes up with more gems.
Run all of these, one by one, through Traffic Travis, when you get to the ’send to sorter’ stage, eliminate any phrases of less than 2 words or greater than 10 as well as anything containing ‘free’ or ‘freeware’. Someone checking out free stuff hasn’t got their credit card out ! Traffic Travis will enable you to download your list to a *.txt file where you will manually delete unsuitable keywords.
Now copy and paste the whole list into the Google tool and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ key, Google will suggest more keywords which you should consider using. Now download your new list to a text file where you will find it conveniently sorted into alphabetical order.
Your final task is to arrange your list into very targeted groups of keywords, that is phrases that are very tightly related. I cannot over emphasize how important this is, your pay per click ads must take your customers to pages that not only use the keywords in those ad groups but must focus completely on the subject they suggest.
If you are in any way unsure about the ‘mechanics’ of working with these tools, I think you will find that after a little trial and error that the Google product is quite simple and the Traffic Travis people have provided very helpful videos.
Stages 2 and 3 will be the subject of other articles. When you get to stage three it will become all too clear why, without some kind of adwords software, this whole approach would be impossible to manage.
John Rivers
