Let us use the travel industry as an example of how to choose a selection of terms. In Pay Per Click advertising, there are generally three types of keywords that are used to cover the online buying cycle. There are, generic, specific and niche terms.
Generic terms consist of terms such as "Cheap Flights", "Cheap Holidays" or even a popular holiday destination such as "Tenerife". The good thing with generic terms is that they will bring you critical mass in the form of large volumes of traffic but these keywords will generally drive the lowest conversion rates as they are too broad. If you are on a modest budget then its best not to use too many generic terms as you will find that your budget gets exhausted quite quickly. You may want to only include a handful of terms just to have some sort or presence on the sponsored listings. Generic keywords such as those mentioned above form part of the "research stage" of the online buying cycle when users are just looking for what is available out on the market without knowing too much about where to go. It's really all about what's going to 'catch their eye' so they can move onto the next stage which would looking at a particular destination.
Below is an example of Ad Text for the term "Cheap Holidays" for a Google AdWords campaign. Short, sweet and straight to the point with a strong call to action although most generic terms do not convert too well
Specific keywords could be terms such as "Cheap holidays to Spain" or "Cheap Flights to Greece". Specific keywords generally consist of phrase based terms. The good thing with these types of keywords is that a visitor will have an idea of which holiday destination they are looking to travel to. If your business offers holidays, flights or accommodation to certain destinations then using the Google Keyword Selector Tool will allow you to ascertain relevant keywords and allow you to build a targeted and relevant inventory of words. Specific terms are a good way to drive a great deal of traffic as well as a modest conversion ratio.
Niche terms often drive the highest level of conversions but they drive very little volume. Therefore, a good strategy is to build a comprehensive list of as many niche terms that are targeted to your service offering as possible. This way you can drive as many targeted users and improve your overall conversion ratios.
For example, if a visitor knows that they want to book the "Jumeirah Beach Hotel" in Dubai and this is part of the hotels on offer, then we should target the search term "Jumeirah Beach Hotel" and all relevant variations we can think of. As long as the bid amount and 'Quality Score' is sufficient to keep the Ad on the first page, when a user types in the above term, our Ad should show up.
An example of niche terms are individual hotel names, specific location names within cities, venue names etc.
Because niche terms are so highly targeted, they often convert better. It is safe to assume that the user has carried out some prior research on the hotel property name for example and is at the stage where they are ready to make a booking or at least are a genuine potential customer. One must therefore ensure that at stage when the user is ready to part with their cash that the landing page that they click through to is very strong and makes the whole clck to conversion process as easy as possible.
Hopefully the above information should have given an insight into how important PPC keyword selection is. Is it imperative that the right choice of keywords and terms are chosen. This is vital to the success to the campaign. The right keywords will help drive sales and leads, the wrong selection will ensure lots of click wastage and very little conversions.
Good Luck and Happy PPC-ing.
We are constantly bombarded by the same generic internet marketing information day-by-day. Over the last 2 years very little has changed in the overall process of internet marketing but what internet marketers do not tell you is why some keywords sell and some do not. This is the whole reason why some websites make enormous amounts of money, while other similar sites make very little if any at all.
There is a science to keyword selection for both Organic Search and Pay-per-Click which means that you can find yourself in a situation where you have invested huge amounts of time in trying to Search Engine Optimise a website for certain keywords only to find they bring you no money at all or invest obscene amounts of money for Pay-per-Click only to find no sales and a huge bill at the end. Personally, my team and I have invested huge amounts of money in generic keywords to find that the conversion rate for the keyword is sitting at 0.1% where as more focused and targeted keywords would in fact bring greater reward and much greater conversion rate.
I know, we have all heard that statement before!
But there are keywords that should be avoided if you truly want sales over just building up a customer database.
My team and I have found that keywords that use the word Free, at no cost, complimentary, or on the house will in fact be poor sales converters and in most cases will not provide any substantial revenue. This is particularly true of those who use those keywords in Pay-Per-Click. In one test we undertook using Google Adwords we offered a FREE Tips Newsletter on using Free Microsoft Word to capture names to build a customer database. My team and I chose keywords that incorporate the keywords Free within the keyword and we spent 12 months working with the list and had over 10,000 names on the list only to find that we achieved no sales.
I should note that we employed a number of expert sales writers and email marketers to assist and try to engineer copy that would entice people to buy but the bottom line was that none of it was going to happen because certain keywords attracts certain types of clients.
We than ran a second test in parallel in which we changed the keywords to disavow the use of the word Free within the Keywords. This new list with a similar number of people in it had a greater conversion rate than that with the word Free. Actually the conversion rate was around 3-5%. Keep in mind one thing, we were still giving away a Free Daily Microsoft Word tips but the difference was that we were attracting two different types of people.
To finish off the test we then compared the two lists for duplicates and here is the truly interesting aspect to our test. There were no duplicates even though they came form totally different websites. What this told us was that we literally had two different market places within the Internet.
We have the Real buyers or the Free buyers. Real Buyers are simply people prepared to invest for getting the information they want and the Free Buyers who simply want everything for FREE. In the first list we created for Microsoft Word Tips we found that very often when we would put offers into our list, we would have people abuse us stating we shouldn't be selling anything, we should be giving it all to them for free. This one occurrence tells you very clearly the choice of keywords is so important.
When looking for Real Buyers through Pay-Per-Click or Organic Search you need to choose keywords that are product specific, name specific or teach a person something. For example, if you had a product such as a book that was a course on teaching dogs to obey commands the most successful keywords you could use would incorporate the words -
Sample keywords you could use for your training course keywords would be -
-teach your dog tricks -teach dog tricks -learn how to train your dog -study how to teach your dog
If you are selling specific products like a book for Bread Recipes for a bread machine then the keywords that would work the best for sales would be keywords like -
-Bread Recipes for Bread Machines -500 Bread Recipes for the Bread Machine -Bread Machine Recipes Book
Whilst the number of hits you will find for each keyword may only be 20 to 30 hits per day, you can confirm this by using tools like Wordtracker, you will find that sales will be more effective than if you use keywords that say -
-Free Bread Recipes for Bread Machines -Free Bread Machine Recipe Book -Free Recipe Book for Bread machines
The bottom line is this, not all keywords sell simply because they attract a different type of customer. Some keywords will attract buyers prepared to buy and other keywords will attract people who have no intention of ever buying.
If you are having trouble selling online and you are doing everything that the Internet Marketing Gurus are telling you, then I would suggest you start to look further at your keywords because maybe you are attracting the wrong customer type. Often there is nothing wrong with your sales copy, nothing wrong with your sales process, nothing wrong with your website, quite often and simply you have chosen the wrong customer for your business by attracting the wrong customer through the keywords you have chosen.
Both Zaheer Fazal & Chris Le Roy are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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