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PPC is a whole different ballgame when it comes to choosing keywords. Compared to traditional SEO, where LSI allows you to rank for many related terms, with PPC you must target specific keywords and that is all you will rank for. So choosing the best keywords that are laser targeted to your campaign is crucial, now more than ever with the quality score algorithm.
That means you want to build tightly knit keyword groups with a relevant destination for many keywords, which gives you better quality score and cheaper clicks.
Building those keyword lists can be tricky though, but I’ve found a pretty neat way to do it yourself. Right now, I’m not subscribed to any major keyword service like Wordtracker, so I’ve been using the Google Keyword Tool, as well as the Wordtracker free keyword tool to gather some basic data.
They do provide you with good ideas, but the keywords you get from these are pretty much all over the map, and not practical for starting an effective ad group for PPC. They can show you some of the good short tail keywords that are getting a lot of traffic, but to generate long tail keywords, they are pretty much junk.
However you can take the short tail keywords, and adapt them yourself to create your long tail keyword possibilities. Take this for example, say you want to sell dog clothes as an affiliate (I hope not though lol), you search up “dog clothes” in the Google Keyword Tool, and get a bunch of semi-related dog clothes keywords.
Here, I see a lot of prefixes: small, large, fancy, luxury, wholesale etc. What we are going to do is generate many different permutations of target keywords using the tool at PermGen.com to create prospective long tail, low competition PPC keywords. You could enter in all of those adjectives into the first word list. Then, in the second word list, include dog, and a list of many dog breeds that you can find anywhere on the net. Finally in the third list, you could enter many different kinds of dog clothes, like sweaters, boots, muzzles etc.
So in the end, you will have a huge list of longtail keywords like luxury poodle sweater, fancy terrier boots etc. etc. Very long tail, but easy to group together, for example, ___ terrier boots, luxury poodle ___.
You can do this with as many combinations of words as you want. Now throw these back into the Adwords Keyword Tool, or better yet a Hexatrack campaign, and you can determine whether it is worth going after these markets.
Many people say that long tail keywords in PPC are dead because of quality score, but I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t have my own conclusive proof yet, but from all the information I’ve read about how to get good quality score, it shouldn’t be a problem at all with tightly knit long tail keyword groups. I’ll definitely bring results to you as I experiment further with this.
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Nice information. We should definitely exchange ideas sometime
I’ve used wordtracker in the past, but prefer to use the google keyword/adword tool. But ofcourse, more analysis is needed once you get a list of commonly searched for keywords, so that you can find your long tail keywords.
I don’t mean to spam, but it relates to this topic. On our website we have created a ‘Niche Warehouse’ application, that contain already analyzed long tail keywords - so most of the hard work is done for you.
There are ways to get past the quality score. I have only really run into campaigns I dumped because of it about 10% of the time.
If you have tracking in place, throw some general keywords in your campaign. Then look at your stats. Save the good phrases for long tail phrases in another ad group. Then add words from the nonconverting phrases to your negative list.
Eventually you will have enough negatives that you will get a good ROI and another adgroup with cheap long tail phrases. Win-win.
Good information…. this is an area I have not mastered yet. I’ve started with short keywords and now need to kick it up a notch to include long tail keywords, so back at it - and thanks again!
If you want to track keywords you should use the overture search.
http://inventory.overture.com/.....uggestion/
It gives exact number of searches for the top 50 keywords of each keyword search on yahoo. Sure its yahoo and the data is from a year ago but it is the best by far and what I use to research keyword demand. Sometimes you have to search a few times to get the page to load.
Great information. Thanks I always enjoy hearing how other go about making their own longtail keywords. Definetly a Great Post. We should compare notes one time, I would enjoy that.
if create keyword with numeric, will it help our SEO?
Great information and good post..Keep up the good work..
Hi, i really like your site layout. I will continue reading here, so i subscribed! Maybe you could check out my site, and even subscribe if you like. Thanks, Zach.
I don’t think the use of long tail keywords need have a ‘negative’ impact, if you include ‘negatives’ as per the good advice in Stephan’s comment. I don’t know why, but when people learn about building keyword groups and lists, it takes a while for the wisdom of using negatives to filter down.
Good work, Tim, love the new site design, and hope you’re enjoying your migration to Wordpress. Reward Rebel
Yes it is important to do proper keyword research and target longtail terms. Also, articles show up really high in the SERPs when you target longtail terms in the title.