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Keyword Research For PPC: Tools and Strategies for Success
Pay-per-click advertising can bring results fast, but there’s an important downside to it. If you don’t configure your paid campaign correctly, it will be shown to the wrong audience and become a money sink.
This is why keyword research for PPC is so important. It allows you to understand how users look for products and services similar to yours, choose the right keywords, and optimise your campaign.
Another important part of PPC optimisation is understanding your audience in general and choosing the right demographics for the campaign, but that begs a separate article.
In this one, you’ll learn all about choosing keywords for PPC.
What Is Keyword Research For PPC?
On social media platforms, paid ads are served to specific audiences in different places on the site. With Google search ads, your ads are shown for specific keywords.
This is where PPC and SEO share some similarities, as the choice of search terms directly impacts the cost of your ad campaign and how effective it is. That’s why keyword research for PPC campaigns is crucial.
Doing research on the keywords you want to include in the campaign can determine:
- What are the PPC keywords that are relevant for your pages.
- How competitive the keywords are.
- How to group the keywords.
- What the search intent is behind them.
- Which keywords you should exclude.
Finding the answers to these questions with a combination of free and paid tools will ensure your campaign is cost-effective from the start.
Why Keyword Research is Critical for PPC Campaigns
Doing keyword research can be the difference between a successful campaign and a failure. Here are three main reasons why.
Understand Search Intent
Search intent is the reason most users put a specific keyword in a search engine. Traditionally, it’s divided into four categories.
- Informational. Used to find information like “types of dress shoes.”
- Navigational. Used to find a website, a page, or a place like “Edward Greene dress shoes.”
- Commercial. Used to find information related to purchases like “best dress shoes for a wedding.”
- Transactional. Used to find and buy something like “burgundy dress shoes with a buckle.”
Understanding what type of keyword belongs to is the first step to deciding whether to include them in your ad campaign. You generally don’t want to use informational and navigational keywords in an ad campaign centred around a product.
The next step is to understand what exactly a user wants to see on Google after using a keyword. For instance, “classic dress shoe” typically means either a brown or a black shoe, so it’s no use spending money on this keyword trying to promote your dress shoes with a fun print.
Drive Qualified Traffic
When you’ve found the right PPC keywords, you can be sure that most of the people who will see your ad are interested in purchasing a product or a service similar to yours.
Since most of the people who view ads are qualified leads, you end up spending less money on the ad campaign and get a better conversion rate.
Improve Quality Scores
When your ad campaign is targeted towards the right keywords and performs well, Google will increase its Ad Quality Score. This means your ad is considered to be relevant and will thus be picked for better placements and given better rates.
This makes proper keyword research the first step in snowballing your ad effectiveness.
Types of Keywords to Consider for PPC
As you’ve learned in the previous section, there are four types of keyword search intents. There are also a couple of types of keywords that are relevant for PPC keyword research.
Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords
Non-branded or general keywords are the keywords that describe a product or a service without mentioning a brand. Branded ones include a brand, typically your brand, a brand of products your store carries, or a competing brand.
The main difference between the two is that non-branded keywords typically have a much higher search volume. Bidding on branded keywords might have a slightly lower bid price.
With brands that your store carries, it’s a no-brainer; it’s good to use them as any other keyword that describes your product well.
You might want to consider your own brand as a keyword if you want to make sure more people see your brand in the search engine result pages (SERP). Your ad is likely to be shown first for the branded keyword.
You can also try to place ads on competing branded searches if what you offer is a close alternative to the brand in question.
Short-Tail vs. Long-Tail Keywords
Another way we can categorise keywords is by the word count.
Short keywords are typically under three words. They’re mostly not phrased as sentences but rather as loose word combinations like “dress shoes buy London.” Since they’re loosely formulated, they mostly have higher search volumes and will provide a wider reach.
The downside, of course, is that the interest is quite wide as well, so you might have to spend more and have a lower conversion rate.
Long-tail keywords are those over three words, and more of them are formulated as phrases or questions, such as “how to choose a good pair of dress shoes.” These keywords are likely to have lower search volume, but if you create an ad that answers the search intent well, you might enjoy a higher conversion rate.
Optimising for long-tail keywords is a good idea for laser-focused ads.
Negative Keywords
Google serves ads not only to the list of keywords that you give it but to similar keywords as well. This means if you want to serve ads for the keyword “shoes,” it will show your ad for keywords like “best running shoes” and “how to choose dress shoes.”
It can also show your ads for irrelevant keywords. In this example, Google might show your ads for keywords like “horseshoes” or “brake shoes.”
Doing keyword research can help you weed out similar but unrelated keywords and add them to the stop list. This will help reduce the number of irrelevant placements and improve the ROI of the campaign.
Where To Find Keywords For PPC Campaigns
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to start generating keywords for your campaign. There are three main ways to do this.
Generate Manually
Start your keyword research for PPC by brainstorming. Take one page that you want to promote at a time and try to come up with very basic keywords that would be relevant for that page. Come up with both broad short-tail keywords and narrow long-tail ones.
Base your list on your page content, analysis of competing pages, and understanding of your audience.
It’s best not to use the list you come up with as is. Use it as a start for further keyword research.
Use Google Keyword Planner
The next step in the keyword research process is to use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to access basic information about keywords. You’re looking to extract metrics like average cost per click (CPC) and search volume.
Another good use for this tool is to look for keywords similar to yours. These can be used to either add to your pool of keywords or to the pool of negative keywords.
Use an SEO Tool
Unfortunately, Google’s free tool isn’t that informative when it comes to keyword analysis. You can use a specialised SEO tool to fill in the gaps.
An SEO tool like bulk keyword generator by SE Ranking can generate thousands of keyword suggestions based on a prompt and show their search intent, search volume, and difficulty score.
By using tools like this one, you can get a lot more data on the keywords you intend to use, including historical ad copies you can use for analysis.
Key PPC Keyword Research Process
Once you have come up with the list of keywords you’d potentially want to see in your ad campaign, do a bit more research on them to fine-tune the list. Here’s how this process goes.
Search Intent and Search Behaviour
Your first task here is to sort the PPC keywords into different stages of the customer journey. To do that, you’ll have to use the information you have on the search intent of the keywords you’ve found and do a bit of manual research.
Look up keywords that you’re unsure about and see what’s in the SERPs. If it’s mostly commercial pages, the intent is likely to be commercial or transactional.
Sort your keywords accordingly.
Leverage Long-Tail Keywords
The next step is to consider whether you want to focus on the short or the long keywords or combine both strategies. Long-tail keywords can be a great way to focus on a small subset of users who might be more likely to convert if your ad is relevant. But it restricts the search volume you’re going to receive.
Make a decision that aligns with your general goals—either more sales or better ROI.
Use Seasonal and Trending Keywords
Lastly, you’ll want to do competitor PPC research. Use specialised software or check the most prominent keywords manually.
But don’t simply copy their keyword list. Study the keywords they bid on that you don’t have on your list. Check how competitive they are, what the average CPC is, and how relevant your competitors’ ads are.
If it seems that your ad would fit right in, add the keyword to your list.
Analyse the Competition
Not all keywords are used consistently. Some have a seasonal trend to them, meaning users will look for them more often at certain times of the year. Others might be trending or going down in search volume based on what’s popular right now.
Using this information, you can adjust your bidding strategy either to bid on more popular keywords at a higher price to get more clicks or to stop bidding and save the ad spend.
Creating a Keyword List for PPC Success
After rigorous research, you can start building the final PPC keyword list that you’re going to use for ads. Here’s where you start.
Organise the List into Ad Groups
As your list might have hundreds of keywords, you should break it up into ad groups. This helps you with optimisation because you can create ads that are highly relevant for specific keywords and their search intent.
Start with grouping the short and broad keywords together. This would include transactional keywords like “buy dress shoes,” “dress shoes men,” and similar words that describe this category.
Then, focus on modifiers. In this case, these would likely be size, style, colour, reason for wearing, or other classifications. For instance, “men’s wedding dress shoes” or “oxford dress shoes burgundy.”
Sort PPC keywords into groups and think of ways you can make your ad more relevant for that group.
Using Negative Keywords
Finding the right negative keywords for your campaign can cut down on costs and increase conversion rates. Here are a couple of ways you can find them.
- Browse Google search manually and pay attention to related searches, as well as the People Also Ask section.
- Use Google Keyword Planner.
- Use Google Search Console to find unrelated keywords.
- Use an SEO tool.
The common types of negative PPC keywords are:
- Similar but unrelated terms (brake shoe).
- Unrelated navigational searches (dress shoes Walmart).
- Unrelated modifiers (cheap dress shoes).
- Unrelated informational searches (are sneakers, dress shoes).
You’ll catch some terms like this during the research, but you’ll have to weed out some more after your ad campaign goes live.
Testing and Refining Keywords
Keyword research for PPC doesn’t end when you launch the campaign. As it starts running, you have to track its performance and refine the keyword list by adding new keywords and blocking others.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your PPC Keywords
At this stage of keyword research, you’ve already done a ton of work finding keywords, analysing, and grouping them. That’s very important work, but some of the assumptions you had at that stage might be proven wrong when the campaign is live.
You have to see how it runs and adjust your keyword list to optimise for ROI and conversions.
Tracking Performance Metrics
The first step in this process is to monitor key performance metrics. Here are the ones you want to focus on.
- Number of conversions.
- Cost per conversion.
- Number of clicks.
- Click through rate.
- Conversion rate.
- Quality rate.
- Return on ad spend.
Track these metrics for all keyword groups and experiment with the groups that don’t show good results. You have to either change the keywords in that group or make the ad copy more relevant.
Another important aspect of performance monitoring is the search terms report. It shows which keywords trigger your ads. Use it to find PPC keywords that are not relevant to your ad campaign and add them to the negative keyword list.
Ongoing Optimisation
With this data on your hands, you can start optimising your ad campaign. Find places that don’t perform well, make a hypothesis on why that’s the case, experiment with the keyword list or ad copy, and see how the results perform.
Don’t forget to also analyse larger PPC trends and possible changes in the search intent to stay on top of recent changes.
Pay close attention to how your ads perform in the first few months of the campaign, as it’s the prime time to fine-tune it and stop wasting ad spend on things that don’t work well.
But don’t stop optimising once you’re happy with the results. Check the campaign performance frequently to catch declining performance, and do a PPC audit once in a while to see if there are new ways to approach your campaign.
Summary
Keyword research for PPC ads in search is the difference between a successful campaign and a waste of advertising budget. Do your due diligence before launching a campaign and analyse the keywords you’re going to use and exclude from your campaign.
When the campaign starts, analyse its performance, pay close attention to the keywords your ads are served on, and fine-tune your keyword list further. It’s a long, ongoing process, so keep patient and work on improving your campaigns as you progress.