“Keywords are the foundation of your Adwords campaigns. Starting with the wrong keywords is like building a house on sand”
People often ask me what’s the one big mistake that people make with Google Adwords…
There’s are plenty of mistakes to choose from, but the biggest mistake you can make is picking the wrong keywords. If you pick the wrong keywords, it doesn’t matter how good your ads are, or how great your website or product is, your campaign is doomed to fail.
To get the best results from your Adwords campaign, you need:
- to pick the right keywords
- to pick plenty of keywords
- to choose keywords that your competitors ignore
The really common mistake people make is to choose too few keywords to bid on. Generally speaking if you are not bidding on hundreds (or thousands) of keywords for your product or service, you’re need to bid on more.
You may have heard of a phrase coined by Chris Anderson, in his bestseller ‘The Long Tail’. When it relates to search engines like Google, the phrase ‘long tail’ relates to the growing number of search terms people use to find what they are looking for.
In every category, there are a few ‘hit’ search terms that get a lot of searches, but there are lots and lots of specific niche terms that are searched just a few times.
While bidding on the popular terms will bring you lots of traffic, the trick with Google is not to ignore the ‘long tail’ terms. It may take 20 or 30 ’long tail’ keywords to give you the same number of clicks as one ‘hit’ keyword, but chances are there’ll be much less competition for those keywords and as a result you’ll pay less for each visitor.
For example, when people are searching for life insurance on Google, the most common term they’ll search for is ‘life insurance’. But less frequently searched for terms like ‘term life cover’ will still bring in a significant number of searches at a lower cost per click.
Typically, I’ll start my list of keywords by
- Writing down the common everyday keywords in my industry
- Search for keywords by visiting my website (& competitors websites)
- Checking my Google Analytics to see which terms are already bringing me visitors in the (free) searches.
- Reading company brochures, sales letters & literature
- Flicking through industry magazines for commonly used phrases
That’ll get you off to a good start. I call it a ’seed’ list, because we’ll use the keywords we’ve put together to grow a much bigger keyword list.
The next step is to take the terms on the list and to use a keyword tool to broaden the list. I use 2 different tools to build as big a list as possible Google’s Keyword Tool & Wordtracker.
Google’s tool is free & it is a good starting point. Wordtracker is a paid service but you can try it out for free for 7 days.
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 1
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 2
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 3
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 4
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 5
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 6
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Day 7
Getting Results With Google Adwords - Targeting the Irish Market