Effective Keyword Research & List Preparation (for PPC) – Day 1

Right – in this case study I want to take you through the entire process of researching and building a keyword (kwd) list for your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign step by step.

There are a lot of really good PPC guides out there, and some of them I swear by with my reputation, but most of them concentrate on PPC campaigns with Google AdWords alone, or they would just skim over the section of kwd list building, presuming it's common knowledge.

Well, I've always said that presumption is the mother of all f***ups, so here is the step by step complete process I go through with every new campaign I start.

So without further adieu, let's get list building :o)…

Before we start our kwd (I will use this abbreviation for the word keyword as of now) mining, we need to decide on a few things.

• What niche market are we marketing into, and…
• What is our product/service.

If you did the first case study with us, (How To Choose a Product to Promote) you would have already decided what you want to do. If you haven't I would strongly recommend that you check it out first, or if you know how to chose a market and a product, just join us here for the next steps :o)

So you need to:

• Decide on a niche (or not so niche) market – I would suggest you start as focused as you can, but it is entirely up to you what market you chose to be in. All I am saying is you need to decide – do you want to be in the "tennis" market or the "tennis for OAPs" market… you get my point.




• Decide what it is you want to do in that market.
• Are you offering your own product/service (i.e. as a vendor)?
• Are you selling someone else's product or service (i.e. as an affiliate)?
• Then we need to decide on what's the purpose for our advertising?




• Do we want to get people to sign up to our/someone else's newsletter or service?




• Do we want people to buy our/someone else's product?




• Do we just want to increase our brand awareness, and presence in the search results?




In other words, at what point do we consider our campaign to have succeeded?

This is very important, as depending on what your purpose is, your campaign and kwd research tactics will be different.

• Decide what will you count as a conversion – a sign-up, a purchase, a page view?

OK, so I will presume that by this point you have all the above sorted…

Now let's get to the *meaty* stuff.

Stage One – Getting to Know Our Product

Now we need to do our due diligence and research the topic of the product we selected. This will help us when we're choosing our words.

The best place to start is the vendor's home page.

We already saw that the sales page is very good in marketing terms, which is ideally what you would want when you're starting out with your campaign. We already discussed what were the good points so I won't spend any more time on that.

We are going back to the page as it will give us good clues as to what the *hot* terms and phrases are for our campaign.

So – here's the link (make sure you open it in a new window, and come back here so we can continue): Sales Page

The page is content rich and I am confident we will get enough kwds here to get us well equipped for our campaign.

To get the content broken down into possible phrases, you could go and do it manually, but it is a lot quicker using the right tools.

So I've opted to use one of the many great and free Firefox extensions and do that in seconds. The extension is called: SEOpen (it's a free download).

If you're not using Firefox as your browser (shame on you… you're missing out on sooo much) you could go here to get the tool directly (also free).

Now for Firefox users – you need to just install the extension I gave you. Then right click on the sales letter page and scroll all the way down to "SEOpen", then choose "Keyword Density" and you'll arrive at the same page as the link above above.

Once you're on the page, type in the code. It's not case sensitive and it's just to prevent bots from running thousands of automatic queries on the tool and overload the system.

OK, so now you should have the following list of possible phrases in front of you:

Now, this is a good place to start, but because this topic is also a hobby/interest of mine I can also come up with more phrases to search on.

Knowing the product, the market, the buyers you're dealing with will give you ammunition to create the right campaign that targets the right prospects and most of all produces sales at the maximum profit for you.

So get knowledgeable about what and to whom you're selling.

Back to our results – you can see some really good phrases straight away. Did you notice that I did the search for three-word phrases only? If you did – well done you're very observant, but you're probably also asking yourself why three?

I did it because I want to be as specific as possible. At this stage we're trying to get "the picture". Searching for smaller phrases will give us results that can be too generic and may not give us the right feeling for the terminology we need to be using.

Bearing in mind what I just said, and the fact that I know that this book has almost turned into it's own brand, I will pick the following from our results (for now):

• burn the fat feed the muscle
• burn the fat
• feed the muscle
• bodybuilders and fitness
• fat burning system
• lean body mass
• lose body fat
• fat loss system
• losing body fat
• permanent fat loss

This gives us a good idea as to the terminology at this stage.

Now get to reading the entire sales copy and by referring continuously to our short list above, start adding any other phrases you deem relevant. Before you do that though, read through to the end of this stage – to get a better idea as to what you should be looking for.

You see, many of the gurus will teach you to go out and get yourself as many kwds as you can master. Bang them on to Google and wait to see what happens (all right maybe not so straight forward), but I agree with the other gurus… The ones that don't want to waste their hard earned cash.

In my experience (and trust me I have tried both), you'll be much more effective if you start off with a select set of specific kwd phrases that closely describe your product.

So while you're reading through that sales copy bear in mind that searchers search with different intents.

Bill Hunt and Mike Moran (in their book "Search Engine Marketing, Inc.") separate searcher intent into three main groups:

1. the navigational searchers
2. the informational searchers
3. the transactional searchers

Who do you think will bring you the highest conversion rate the quickest?

If you said the buyers – you'd be spot on!

This is the bigger picture

We don't want to look at the informational searches yet – these we'll add once we make our initial list work – at a profit… These will need a bit more time and convincing – specific content, perhaps a newsletter subscription and so on… as these people are not at a stage where they are ready to buy from us.

Then we have the navigational searchers. They are not so obvious to figure out, but with some exceptions, depending on the type of site/product we are sending them to – those will always convert well. The down side is that they may not be so many – so the low volume won't allow us to make a lot.

So the biggest group we can start with is the transactional searchers – these are people who have done their research, weighed their options, and are almost ready to make the purchase.

Think of their state of mind when they are looking for the product you're selling.

To give you an e.g. for each:

navigational search phrase – "burnthefat.com"


informational searchers phrase – "how to lose weight"


transactional searchers phrase – "fat burn guide"

I'll elaborate in the next stage – for now though – go read the sales page, while taking notes on the language used and any key prases that will help you get in the mind of the people who'll be looking for and buying that type of product – go go go :o).

See you back here tomorrow, when we get to source our list of kwds…

Anita

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