Google Ads is a powerful tool for generating revenue for your business, but it’s only effective if you know how to use it. The key is knowing how to pick the keywords that are most relevant to your business. But how do you determine that?
If you’re wondering how to choose keywords for Google Ads — you’re in the right place.
There are several PPC mistakes that commonly cause PPC campaigns to underperform, so knowing what to do and what not to do is crucial. Poor PPC management can leave you wondering what went wrong and if Google Ads is even worth it.
Believe me, it is.
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
Like Mr. Abraham Lincoln, we believe that strategy and preparation are key to success. Check out our three hacks that will help you choose the best keywords for your PPC campaigns and increase your leads or customers. Eliminate your Google advertising frustrations by learning how to choose keywords for Google Ads effectively!
#1 - Use Google Trends
Google Trends is a free, online tool that provides real-time information about what keywords audiences are searching for on Google and YouTube. This up-to-date keyword data provides marketers with invaluable insight into what keywords are trending, the long-term popularity of a keyword, related queries, and other keyword research information. However, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information available to you through Google Trends. Knowing the best practices for this helpful tool can help you make the most use of it.
When using Google Trends, choose keywords that are relevant to your product, service, or niche, then take a look to see how they’re trending with your target audience. You may find that similar phrases are actually more popular with your intended audiences and are both ranking better and have more search volume.
Google Trends can also help you choose the right time at which to target certain keywords. With the information available through the tool, you can identify trends throughout the calendar year to avoid bidding on keywords that no one is really searching for. Many professional PPC experts abide by some PPC best practices and use helpful tools to quickly identify the most promising keywords for their campaigns.
#2 - Know Who Your Customer Is
In order to select the right keywords for your PPC campaign, you first need to know who your customer is, what they’re looking for, and how you can best reach them. Crucially, you’ll also want to know how they communicate during the buyer’s journey. That is, what language are your customers using when they interact with your business? From the pre-sale to after the transaction, what are they asking you?
Their choice of words are indicators of the words they will use when performing a Google search that may or may not be identified in the Google Keywords Planner. In order to understand their thoughts and emotions at each stage of the buyer’s journey, it helps to put yourself in their shoes. What pain points are they experiencing at each stage? What questions are they asking before they know they have a problem, when they finally realize what it is, and when they’re evaluating potential solutions?
One potential method to gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s mentality at each stage is to use The World’s Best Buyer Persona® System. Unlike most buyer persona techniques, The WBBPS walks people through a dive deep into the mind of your potential customers, explores the emotions they feel at each stage, and evaluates the needs they seek to fulfill. With this psychographic map complete, you can have a much better grasp of just what questions they’ll be asking and how to position your business as a source of answers with authority.
#3 - Don't Forget Keyword Modifiers
A keyword modifier is simply another word or set of words that you can add to a short-tail keyword. The result is a long-tail keyword with lower traffic and overall competition than the original short-tail keyword but greater specificity to your target audience. These keywords are easier to rank for and can position your business at the specific points where a prospect moves from one stage to another across the buyer’s journey.
Geography-based keyword modifiers are excellent for creating keywords specific to a local market. Intent modifiers, such as ”low cost [keyword]” or “emergency [keyword],” can help you target leads when they’re at a specific point in the buyer’s journey. Likewise, adjectives describing the specific features of your products or services can help you narrow your focus on the specific customers who are looking for what your business has to offer.
There are hundreds upon thousands of modifiers that you can use to create keywords, but it can be hard to find the right ones for your company. That’s why it pays to work with an experienced PPC agency that can make your advertising dollars count.
Struggling With How to Choose The Best Keyword For Google Ads? Let Us Help!
If you didn’t know how to choose keywords for Google Ads, you surely do now! Go ahead and put these tips into practice and watch your results improve.
Creating a working PPC campaign from scratch is hard enough. Making sure you’re getting the most from your budget is almost impossible if you try to do it all on your own. At Yokel Local, one of Nevada’s leading digital marketing agencies, our team of inbound marketing experts can leverage our decades of experience to create a PPC campaign that will maximize the return on your advertising budget. Contact us today for a free PPC coaching call!
Video Transcript
Abraham Lincoln once said that if he had six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend five hours sharpening the axe.
Well in today's edition of #AskYokelLocal we're going to talk about how to identify and pick the best keywords for your Google Ads Campaigns. And what we're going to do is spend more of the time talking about how to sharpen the axe. I hope you stick around.
Hey everyone. My name is Darrell Evans. I'm the co-founder of Yokel Local Internet Marketing, and in today's edition we're going to tackle the question of how to change your best keywords.
Now this question came from a client of ours who had this conversation with us and we broke down some ideas that gave him some help and here's what I want to do for you today.
I want to tell you about three things that we bring into the conversation when we're looking at building campaigns and optimizing those campaigns.
The first thing is the use of a tool called Google Trends. Now everyone who gets invited to the Google Ads platform has access to the Google Keyword Planner and it's a great place to start, but I wouldn't stop there
And, by the way, if you're a seasoned marketer or advertising agency you know there's other tools that are more specific that are highly advanced, so this really isn't for you.
This is for the business owner who's sitting there trying to run their own campaigns from 6:00 at night until 2:00 in the morning after they already did their professional job during the day. So this is who it's really cut out for.
Google Trends is a website that can give you ideas of trends of certain keywords and of course you would start with your product or your service or your industry or your niche. And you're looking for actual trends throughout the calendar year because you could end up bidding on keywords where there's no trend, that anyone's really searching for that keyword.
The other thing that you're going to find are you're going to find breakout, keywords and phrases, that would give you some other ammunition to go back to the Google Keyword Planner tool and use sort of as your seed keyword. I'd really encourage you to google Google Trends, and start looking at that tool as part of your research process.
The second thing is going to go right back to your customer. We always tell our clients that we want to know who your customer is and how they speak during the buying process, and this is important. It comes back to buyer persona. It comes back to the buyer's journey. What we want to know the language that your customer is using when they speak with you during the interaction.
That's during the pre-sell interaction, that's during the customer interaction, and then what are they asking you after the transaction has taken place, because they're going to be indicators and hints about the words that they're saying to themselves, they're saying to you. They're also going to be searching those phrases and Google may or may not identify those in the Google Keyword tool.
So I hope that was helpful.
Number three, and this one's a little bit interesting, but you want to start thinking about modifiers. Now what do I mean by modifiers?
Certainly the easiest modifier to a keyword or a keyword phrase is by adding a local city or geography and it's a good place to start. If you're doing business in a local market like Seattle, Washington or Austin, Texas, then by all means you should look at the different variations of the city.
But I also want you to think about what I call intent modifiers and intent modifiers may look like this. They may look like low cost keyword, fast, X-Y-Z.
So let me, for instance, you know, emergency plumbing, emergency dentist, those kinds of intention. When you find intention related phrases to tie onto your keywords, you're also going to be dialing in to where that customer is in the buyer's journey a little bit more effectively.
And so when you talk about optimizing keywords, I mean, there's so many keywords that you could possibly bid on and I can assure you, you don't have enough money to bid on them all. So if you're looking for the best keywords, be a five-hour person.
Spend time dialing down the keywords. Google trends, the FAQ's, the frequently asked questions and the customer dialogs that you've had in your business, and I'm assuming if you're doing Good Ads, you didn't just start your business last week.
You've got some history, you've got customers. Go survey those customers. And then last, and most importantly, take a look at the modifiers, the intention modifiers, and that's going to look differently depending on the industry.
So those are my three tips today.
Again, be a five-hour person when it comes to setting up your campaigns. Really in anything in marketing, so often, people jump right into the tactic or the strategy. They start, you know, doing stuff, and they have no idea what's really available and sometimes it's right under their nose.
Anyway, my name's Darrell Evans. I'll see you on the next edition of #AskYokelLocal. Thanks.
