In Internet marketing, keyword lists are one of the essential ways merchants and affiliates connect with the customer. The advertiser is essentially anticipating what the customer is looking for. What many Internet marketers neglect to do though when they compile their list is to “go wide” before “going deep”. In this article I'll reveal one of the keyword strategies that separate the pros from the newbies.



A wide keyword list is one that has large amount of related and lateral keywords. A deep keyword list usually only contains variations of one single, obvious root keyword.

For example, if you were promoting a home beer brewing ebook, the most obvious way to go about compiling a keyword list would revolve around the terms,”beer” and “home brewing”. For example:

home brew

home brewing

brew beer

brew beer at home

home made beer

how to make beer

Seems ok, but the problem is that this keyword list has a very narrow focus on highly competitive, higher cost keywords. Mainly because they are the most obvious, so everyone else is using those keywords. This is an example of going DEEP.

Go as WIDE as you can, try many different angles that may be relevant to the niche.

For a quick example, instead of just “home brew beer”

try as well:

home brew ale

home brewing lager

home brewing stout

home brewing pilsner

beer recipes

pilsner recipes

stout recipes

lager recipes

how to make beer

how to make Scottish ale

how to make Belgian lambic beer

....and various combinations of:

how to ferment your own beer

how to make Irish Stout

home microbrewery

Budweiser clone

The idea of going wide is that you find out which SUB NICHE of keywords produces the most traffic and conversions. Once you identify the keywords and phrases that are working for you, you then go really deep and find every combination of that sub niche. If, for example, you find that “home brew ale” is a profitable phrase, expand and find every possible variation of the phrase “home brew ale”. (These variations are known as “longtails”)

One thing to remember when you using the “going wide”strategy is to correctly group your keywords in relevant ad groups. This is important for when you get around to setting up your PPC campaign. Do not just put every keyword in one big ad group. You really should aim to have multiple ad groups, each containing tightly matched, relevant keywords.

You could have an ad group named “Lager”, containing keywords such as:

home brew lager

how to make lager

ferment lager

lager recipes

etc.....

Another one called “Stout” with the keywords and phrases:

home brew stout

how to make stout

how to make Irish stout

ferment stout at home

ferment stout

stout recipes

You get the idea. The reason behind doing this is so you can make your keywords as relevant to the ad headline and text as possible. This in turn will significantly increase your click through, and conversion rates. If a person is specifically searching for “how to make stout”, an ad which is targeted for "stout" will have a better chance of being clicked than one which is broadly aimed at “home brewing”.