The reason most PPC campaigns fail isn’t because of poor ad copy, lack of creativity, or even budget. Most failures are down to not targeting the right search terms in the first place. And that’s down to poor PPC keyword research. Finding the best PPC keywords is an important job, but it’s relatively easy to
The reason most PPC campaigns fail isn’t because of poor ad copy, lack of creativity, or even budget.
Most failures are down to not targeting the right search terms in the first place.
And that’s down to poor PPC keyword research.
Finding the best PPC keywords is an important job, but it’s relatively easy to do if you follow a few simple steps.
PPC and SEO work in the same environment, search engine results pages. But the way you’ll approach them is different.
With SEO, you have a much wider mix of keywords and search intents to go after.
Informational searches like “how to” are going to play a big part in your SEO keyword strategy because the goal is to get in front of your audience early in the buyer journey, not always at the point they’re looking to buy.
With PPC, it’s different. You’re paying for the clicks and traffic you get, which means your target keywords need to have some commercial intent behind them to make them worth going for.
This is particularly true now with AI overviews presenting informational content directly in the SERPs results.
Before you start thinking budgets, think about what you want to achieve with PPC.
For example, are you an eCommerce business trying to make direct sales?
Are you using PPC as a brand-building tool with remarketing to target people who’ve been on your website previously?
Are you targeting customers nationally? Or do you want to target more local customers?
An eCommerce business might target broader national keywords like: “best men’s running shoes”.
Compare that to a Manchester roofing company, which is more likely to go local with terms like “emergency roofer in Manchester”.
There are a lot of keyword types you can use in a PPC campaign, and depending on your goals and budget, you’re likely going to use a combination of them.
When it comes to the most profitable keywords, transactional searches tend to deliver the best commercial results.
These users are actively looking to buy, so these keywords are always worth researching.
Branded keywords can also be profitable, but they can be more of a brand protection campaign, making sure you appear at the top of search results for your own name, rather than a competitor getting the chance to take customers.
Along with specific keywords for your PPC campaigns, you’ll need to understand match types.
The wrong match types can damage your return on investment from paid campaigns and result in you appearing for more irrelevant searches, getting clicks that waste your budget.
These include synonyms and related topics to your main keyword. It can be good for finding keywords you’d never considered, but it can also bring in a lot of irrelevant clicks that eat your budget. If you’re going to use broad match, be
prepared to put a lot of effort into removing irrelevant keywords regularly to avoid wasted spend.
Today, this pretty much works like broad match. In theory, it should work when a user makes a query with your keyword phrase in sequence. But, we’ve found it increasingly works like broad match and can throw up a lot of irrelevant queries.
Again, if you’re going to use this, be prepared to put the work in to remove irrelevant keywords.
You’ll appear when a user searches for your exact keyword. For example, PPC agency in Liverpool.
This is a very specific keyword type that can be useful for high-intent keywords that you know, and that convert.
However, it can limit the number of keywords you appear for.
There’s always a lot of debate about which keyword match types your PPC campaigns should use. We’d usually recommend a high amount of exact match keywords in your initial list to focus campaigns on known high-converting keywords.
We’d couple that with some controlled phrase match keywords that can help identify other useful terms that your users use.
This would be coupled (especially in the early days of a new account with no previous data) with an aggressive negative keyword campaign that quickly removes irrelevant keywords from campaigns to avoid wasting budget.
Unless you’ve got a very high budget, or are willing to commit to extreme testing, we’d usually advise you avoid using broad match keywords.
Step 1 – Find your seed keywords
Step 2 – Use keyword planning tools to improve your list
Step 3 – Search intent
Step 4 – Create ad groups
Step 5 – Add negative keywords
Seed keywords just mean the initial keywords your campaigns will be built on.
The easiest way to start thinking of keywords is to use your product category or service name.
For example, if you sell golf clubs:
Another way to find seed and variation keyword ideas is to talk to your sales or support teams.
Ask how customers talk about your products or services, what types of questions they have or how they describe your products.
If customers use these terms with your sales and support teams, they’re likely to use them when researching online too.
Once you’ve got an initial list of seed keywords, you’ll need to confirm that they’re right and that they have enough search volume to target. You’ll also want to start expanding your list of keywords to target other searches.
The easiest way to do this for free is to use Google’s keyword planning tool in your ad account.
Just go to tools → planning → keyword planner
You can use the keyword planner to either find new keywords or get search volumes and forecasts for a list of keywords you’ve already got.
To find new keywords, you can add your list of seed keywords into the planning tool, or add your website URL into the search tool, and Google will suggest keywords based on your website content:
With your expanded list of keywords, you can now start to prioritise them by search intent:
Transaction: “Buy golf club set”
Navigation: “Ping golf club set”
Information: “How to choose a golf club set”
Based on the goal of your PPC campaign, you can now prioritise which keyword intents you’ll focus on.
Like we’ve said, you’re likely to want to focus on transactional or navigational terms as these have the most commercial potential.
Informational keywords can be useful for any remarketing or retargeting campaigns as part of a bigger brand-building campaign, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of your budget.
Ad groups help you group similar keywords together so your ad copy and landing pages match closely and avoid crossover between similar terms. This can help improve the quality score of your campaigns (by aligning intent) and lowering CPCs.
With automation and smart bidding features within Google Ad accounts, we’d usually advise that you stick with Single Theme Ad Groups to avoid excessively large ad groups that include unrelated keywords.
This is an example of how you could break your golf club PPC campaign into ad groups:
Theme – Simple transactional keywords
Exact match:
Golf club set
Golf club set for sale
Buy golf club set
Phrase match:
Buy golf club set
Golf club set for beginners
Keywords:
Men’s golf club set
Golf club set for men
Men’s golf club sets for beginners
Keywords:
Beginner golf club set
Best golf club for beginners
Starter golf club set
Remember, negative keywords remove certain phrases from your campaigns so you don’t show up for them and potentially waste click budget on irrelevant searches.
Your negative keyword list will grow over time as you start to get more campaign data, but start with a seed list of negative keywords from the start.
Using the golf club campaign as an example, you could start with these negative keywords:
Free
Cheap
Top 10
Comparison
Ratings
Golf club repair (unless this is a service you offer)
Used
Second hand
Refurbished
As part of your ongoing campaign management, look at your search terms report every week (minimum) and add irrelevant terms to your negative keyword list.
In the early days of a campaign on a new account, it could be worth doing this multiple times a week to ensure you’re quickly removing irrelevant searches from your campaigns, reserving your click budget.
There are three levels that you can add negative keywords to your campaigns:
Use this to exclude negative keywords across all your campaigns. You can do this by going to account settings → admin → negative keywords
If you’re running separate branded or non-branded campaigns, you can add negative keywords to each campaign over time.
You can do this by choosing the campaign you want, then going to keywords & targeting → negative keywords
This can be good if you have one group targeting a certain level of product. For example, if you’re selling a premium service, you can remove phrases like “free” or “cheap” from these groups.
You do this by going to Ad groups → choose your ad group → negative keywords
Just like SEO keyword research, there are lots of considerations when choosing a keyword beyond how many people search it.
You should look at:
Search volume: Is there enough search demand for the keyword to be worth bidding on?
Cost per click (CPC): Can you afford to compete for the keyword based on your budget? You should also consider your CTR, conversion rates and lead to sale rate here to determine how many clicks you’ll need to get a customer, as this could mean you won’t get a return on the click budget.
Competition: How many businesses are competing for the keyword? High competition could increase the CPC, which could make certain keywords too costly.
Search intent: Does the search intent match the goal of your campaign? For example, is it likely to result in a sale or conversion, or is someone just researching?
Taking all this into account can help focus your keywords on the phrases that are more likely to get commercial results.
For example, a keyword with 100 searches a month, but with low competition and high sales intent, is going to be more valuable than a keyword with 2,000 searches but isn’t likely to result in a sale.
If you have historic campaign data in your Google Ads account, use this to see which keywords have the highest conversion rates, so you can focus on these while running experiments on other keywords.
Long-tail keywords are more specific variations of your seed keyword.
For example, if your main keyword is golf club set, a long-tail variation could be “best golf club set for beginners”.
Long-tail keywords tend to have less competition, a higher search intent (because the query is more specific to what the user is looking for) and can be cheaper to bid on with PPC.
Be sure to review the performance of any long-term searches in your campaigns to make sure they are driving conversions.
Geo-modifiers add a local element to your keywords and can be more beneficial for local businesses or those targeting a specific area.
For example, you might try targeting “storage space in Liverpool” specifically, rather than just storage space.
These modifiers are essential when running localised PPC campaigns.
PPC keyword lists aren’t a one-and-done project.
Managing PPC keywords is a long-term commitment and process of review and optimisation to make your campaigns more targeted to the best keywords and phrases.
As a minimum, it’s worth reviewing your search terms weekly to see which are delivering a good ROI and which are underperforming or aren’t relevant.
Depending on your match type, you’ll need to be aggressive with your negative keyword list and add to it weekly, as a minimum, to ensure you’re not wasting money on irrelevant terms.
One overlooked part of your PPC keyword research (and one that a lot of PPC agencies don’t get involved with) is matching the keywords in your account to the keywords you use on your landing page.
Your ad copy, targeting and landing pages are all parts of the same campaign. And if one element fails, so will the rest.
If you’re not using the same terms on your landing pages as you are in your ad copy, it can hurt your conversion rate if you don’t match the user intent.
And it can make your campaigns more expensive by lowering your Quality Score.
Keywords are the foundation of your PPC campaigns, and any results you see (positive or negative) are going to branch out of your initial keyword research.
The more targeted you are on the terms your customers are using and the closer you can match your ads and landing pages to customer intent, the more results you’re going to see from your campaigns.
PPC isn’t always about who has the biggest budget. It’s about who can use their budget more effectively.
If you want to see how you could be getting better results from your PPC campaigns, give our PPC agency a call and book your free strategy session.
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