How to Find Profitable Keywords For Your Pay Per Click Campaign

As a pay per click campaign is designed to attract potential buyers to your business, selecting the profitable keywords is crucial. Informational keywords (people searching for free information) should be avoided and those keywords oriented to take action should be selected. In marketing terms, your target market is people who are looking to buy / acquire something and are looking for ways to do so. It\’s what we call the end of the buying cycle\’ your best chance at getting your prospect to buy something is right before he makes a purchase.

When you are looking at keywords, you can use the metrics mentioned below as a means to judge whether a topic is worth pursuing or not, but when you are doing keyword research, make sure that you target those keywords that prospects will be searching for when they are collecting information that will help them make a positive / negative buying decision.

An easy way to determine the profitability of a topic is to measure it by the PPC metrics\’ which are Popularity, Price, and Competition.

Popularity

In crude terms, the more popular the topic is the more clicks you will get on your ads and the more chances you will have of converting those prospects into customers. Higher popularity means more profits for you. On the other hand, popular topics are already very competitive (in most cases), so you have to analyze it from all sides.

Low-popularity topics can also turn good profits, so just because a topic does not get 100,000 searches a month does not mean you shouldn\’t go near it. The key is to match all three factors popularity, price and competition before making a decision to target that market.

Price

The price of the product you are promoting will determine your profit margins. With high-priced products you can afford to spend more money per click, and that\’s mainly why you see such outrageous bids for terms like real estate, insurance, lawyers and pharmaceuticals they can afford it because making a couple of sales gives them huge profit margins. On the other hand, with products with a low price point you will have trouble going overboard with your bidding, and you will need to be very careful with what you\’re willing to pay. In such a case, keyword research becomes even more important as you absolutely must find those keywords that you can target cheaply.

Competition

What is your competition like? Heavy bidding will suggest one of two things either the market is lucrative enough to risk investing so much money (back to the price point\’ discussion above) or there is someone trying to price their competition out of the market. In either case, you wouldn\’t want to spend too much money at the start, so this step will give you an idea of whether you can enter a niche without getting totally burned.\r Another point to consider is that if there is low competition for a topic, you have to figure out why that is. Is it because the niche isn\’t well known? Are people having trouble selling\’ in this market? Or are they targeting the wrong\’ market?

How To Do Keyword Research?

Once you have a topic, you can quickly run it through the following steps to judge its profitability and create a focused list of keywords.

For doing a keyword research, three steps should be followed:se the keyword databases to find out if it is popular Research the PPC engines and find out what the top bid prices are Go back to the keyword databases and create a focused list of keywords

Step 1 Popularity Check\r \r As a free resource, you can use the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.

Step 2 Bid Price Check\r \r Most people will tell you to go to the Yahoo Bid Tool and see their numbers to get an idea of what the top bids are. It\’s a good idea, but why not go to Google instead and use the tools they have provided to us inside the Google Adwords account?. This way we get to see numbers for Google Adwords (where we will be bidding), and not some other PPC engine.

You should already have signed up for a Google Adwords account in order to use the Adwords tools. Within your account, go to Tools > Traffic Estimator to launch Google Adwords\’ traffic and bid cost estimation tool.

Enter your keywords in the provided box (don\’t worry about broad, phrase, exact and negative matches for now). These keywords will be the ones you saved in your spreadsheet. Next select the maximum cost-per-click that you\’re willing to pay, as well as your daily budget. Since we are going for maximum clicks here (top ad position, unlimited budget), we will leave these empty because in that case Google automatically selects values that give you max clicks daily. Remember that this is for estimation purposes only.

Select Language and Location Targeting as desired, click on Continue and you\’ll be taken to the next page with the Traffic Estimator\’s results.

This Traffic Estimator screen is very helpful because it provides a good estimate as to how much the top Adwords bidders are paying \”per click\” for each of the keywords you entered. Also, you\’ll be able to see roughly how many clicks you can expect to get \”per day\” if you were in a certain ad position in Google. And finally, you\’ll be able to see roughly how much you could expect to pay \”per day\” for each of the keywords.

These are some VERY helpful numbers.

By looking at these numbers you can get an idea how much you can pay for your keywords in relation with the expected income generated for the sale of your product, provided you get a reasonable conversion rate as you direct your traffic to a page with good sales copy. Hopefully. You\’ll notice that most clicks go to a few keywords. These are the ones you will be shaping your ad groups around. Adwords is all a numbers game. Know your metrics (how much a customer is worth to you) and you\’ll be a step ahead of the competition.

Step 3 Creating Keyword Lists for Sub-Topics

Once you\’ve put together this list, go back to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and enter your second relevant related keyword into the search box and press the arrow to generate a new keyword list.

What are we doing here?

The best strategy to choose keywords here is to start off with your parent term, pick up the top terms from its list, and then drill down\’ to find more keywords for those terms.

For example, with Insurance as our parent term, we can derive lots of targeted keywords for that term. We can have health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, etc. You can also have subtopics from these secondary terms. They can also get quite a number of searches themselves, so it\’s worth targeting that traffic specifically (as opposed to running general ads).

So for each term that is a \”subtopic\” (you have to use your judgement here) and has a lot of searches, you should run it again through the Keyword Selector Tool and create a list for that term as well.

For each subtopic, create separate lists in a spreadsheet in order to sort them up to further paste into the appropriate Adwords window.

At the end of this process you will probably have around 100-200 strong keywords on 4-5 subtopics (and 1 parent topic). That\’s a good number to start with.

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