This is a guest post by Mark Simmons, a seasoned SEM, SEO, SMM professional and freelance consultant based in Raleigh, NC. As managing partner of marCis Interactive Consulting, Mark specializes in creating comprehensive online marketing strategies and providing highly-effective campaign management services. He can be reached at mark@marcisconsulting.com for more info.
Often times, marketers overlook the importance of a campaign?s keywords in favor of catchy creative, fancy testing techniques or their reliance on bid management software to sort it all out. Now, I?m not saying that these individual components are not important. Everything plays a role in the success of a campaign. However, keywords make up the fundamental basis of a strong campaign.
Keywords are vital because they indicate user intent. We can determine if the consumer is in the research phase looking for general information, looking for a specific product or brand and when they are ready to make a purchase. Using this information, we can effectively group the keywords into relevant categories in order to creative appropriate (and timely) ads, improving our chances of creating a positive user experience.
All too often, inexperienced markets will take a quantity over quality approach. Judging a campaign by the large number of keywords it contains does not indicate its potential for success. On the contrary, smaller, highly-targeted sets of keywords are the best way to control spend and drive ROI. Once best performers are identified, you can experiment with variations of these keywords instead of making random guesses. Keywords can also be used to beef up your other marketing channels. Successful PPC keywords can be used as content in email, mobile or banner creative.
A successful SEM campaign makes use of many tools and strategies. Start with solid keyword research and add some intuitive thought to get into the mind of your potential customer. You?ll find that using this approach from the beginning can lessen the learning curve and speed up your path to a positive ROI.
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Mark, I completely agree. Finding the right keywords is very important. As someone who works with many clients and their SEO strategies, keyword research is the first item we address. I currently use a number of tools to complete the keyword research. I use Google Keyword Tool in conjunction with IBusiness Promoter (IBP). IBP allows you to extract keywords from the Google Keyword tool and then it pulls the average monthly searchs, KEI, Search Results, Top URL, Top URL Page Rank and more. Also, when I am geo targeting keywords, or need permutations I use this tool, http://semtools.closed-loop-marketing.com/. It has been a great resource. This tool also helps with PPC keywords as it has a keyword wrapper tool. What tools do you use?
PB - Keyword Discovery is a great tool because it gives search query info and misspellings, variations, etc. The Google tool is good to get a start, especially since you can plugin a URL and let it go to town. However, Google's tool gives a lot of irrelevant results - so use caution. Additionally, you are using your analytics to discover new keywords.
It is all too easy to get hung up on the quanity of people using a particular search term. Not only are long tail keywords easier to rank for but they are more often the words the most interested people will type.