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The Backbone of Your PPC Campaigns - Your Keyword Lists

Your keyword lists are the backbone of any PPC campaign. You need
to properly source and research relevant keywords. Develop a good
long list. Go deep and go wide, by that I mean explore every avenue
and every avenue off every avenue etc etc.

Here's a brief example of how to expand your lists by exploring related
avenues. For this example I'll use mortgage as the root keyword.

Mortgage is a very competitive keyword on the Net because the
commissions are very good.

So how do you get in on the action without paying through the nose?

Create your first list and think of different ways your prospect can
interpret mortgage e.g. best loan, buy house, bad credit mortgage,
no status loan, home finance, house purchase finance etc. This really
is only marginally removed from the main keywords, you should dig
deeper still.

Next try expanding into types of mortgage – interest only, flexible etc
now
take these and mix them up with your first list as you do this you’ll find
avenues of keyword clusters present themselves from single keywords
e.g. flexible home finance, interest only house loan etc.

You could set up an Ad group focused entirely on mortgage company
names take that further still and add a .com to the name or a co.uk or
your own countries extension e.g. www.somemortgagecompany.com.
It doesn’t matter if this domain doesn’t exist, people type these in to a
search engine so it’s possible you can pick up very low cost traffic with
these keywords.

Stay clear of the general keywords and dig a little deeper to expand on
related terms or, here’s a good one, rephrase those terms e.g. turn
cheap mortgage around and use mortgage cheap too. Put yourself
in your prospects shoes. What would they search for? How would they
type it into Google? People don't always type a search phrase in a
logical order.

For some quick avenues to explore check out these keyword goldmines –

Spelling errors, no spaces between the phrase words e.g. buywidget,
plurals, domain names, serial numbers, product numbers, add .com or
.net or .info etc, company names, company domain names,
domain names and variations e.g. mydomain.com www.mydomain etc,
competition sites, foreign words, US or UK spelling, product names,
typo’s, hyphens instead of spaces, Add superlatives e.g. best, cheap,
cheapest, best buy.

Be sure to separate out all these keywords in to different lists. You will
be setting up different Ad groups for each. It's important to not simply
drop them all into one campaign together. Instead place all the typos in
one Ad group all the plurals in another and so on.

But I haven't finished yet. :)

Check your site Log files, they’re a great source of info on your site
visitors and they’ll tell you what keywords people used to find you.

Try regional targeting, think of different words phrases for describing a
region e.g. new york, east coast
Try long lists of more regional (town, city, state, province) words e.g.
buy car new york, canadian life insurance etc then go back to the top
and try spelling errors, no spaces, plurals etc on these.

Look for industry jargon or buzz words you could utilize related to your
market.

Search for your main keywords on the search engines and see what
related terms pop up. Check the meta tags on your competitors site.
Check the copy on your competitors site.

A fantastic way to explore those keyword avenues mentioned earlier is to
utilize an online thesaurus. So back to my mortgage example. A quick
thesaurus search on mortgage brings up a number of phrases instalment
being one of them.

I could expand on instalment and build a collection of words around that
e.g. low mortgage instalments, mortgage instalment table, mortgage
instalment payments. Again place this collection of keywords in to it's own
Ad group.

Do you see were this is going. I trust that gives you an idea of the power of
going deep and wide on your keyword list building.

It sounds like a lot of work and in all honesty it is. It takes time to source
keywords, edit them removing duplicates, format them adding the Adwords
formating such as exact match to a long list of keywords is a drag. Then
of course you have to manage all these lists via numerous Notepad or
Excel documents.

That's exactly why you should do it because chances are your competitor
hasn't. He's seen it as a drag too and not bothered with it. Or he's simply
not this advanced in his campaign creation. Giving you an immediate
advantage. :)

About the Author
Darren Yates is the creator of PPC Accelerator the shortcut to finding
highly searched keywords and editing, formating and managing them
in one place fast. Software developed on the back of 3 years of experience
on using Adwords. Watch the video demonstration - PPC Accelerator