Choosing profitable keywords for your Google PPC campaign is not a easy as you might thing so read carefully.

One of the biggest mistakes that new PPC advertisers make to simply throw a ton of keywords into the same ad group and then just to let it run. They believe that such a strategy will help them to gain a higher level of exposure.

In fact, this is a major mistake which will cause your quality score to go down, which in turn, will increase your overall cost.

Keyword Tools

It’s to do keyword research properly using your brain alone. Although it’s important that when choosing keywords to think like a customer it’s mandatory to use tools to identify profitable keywords.

For starters you use Google Google’s PPC keyword tool.

Google’s keyword tool will provide you with information on traffic volumes, competition etc. for each keyword which can be exported to Excel and other formats for further analysis.
Another keyword tool to help you build many relevant phrases is Wordtracker (sit in aff link).

A great feature of Wordtracker is the ability to effortlessly do lateral keyword research.

Keep in mind that keywords which are too broad can lower the performance of your Adwords campaign by generating a lot of ad impressions but few clicks. To avoid this choose specific keywords that relate to your business and delete generic keywords that relate to a wide spectrum of products or services.

One-word keywords are in most cases too generic, so you should try to use two- or better yet three-word phrases. It’s difficult to gauge the intent of a searcher if they only type in a single word into Google.

For example, if someone enters a query like Johannesburg it will be impossible to understand the searcher’s intent. However, should someone uses a search term like Sandton, Johannesburg Guest House we know almost exactly what the searcher’s need is.

After you have identified as many relevant phrases as possible, you can concentrate your efforts on creating variations of the results by…

1…Including relevant keyword variations including singular/plural versions, alternate spellings, and synonyms.

2…Adding different keyword matching options. With some you’ll get more ad impressions; with     others you’ll get more focused targeting

3...Adding hyphens between words in each phrase

Don’t forget to add negative keywords as well to make sure that your ads don’t show for irrelevant searches.

After you’ve compiled a list of keywords you can submit them into your Google PPC campaign. The Adwords system will immediately scan your landing page and compare each individual keyword with your landing page and ad text and decide if your chosen keywords are relevant or not.

Google will rank irrelevant keywords as ‘poor’ and keywords they deem relevant as ‘good’ or ‘great’.

Keywords with a ‘poor’ quality score will cost you more and appear lower in the search results.

Google’s main concern is relevancy and if the Adwords system grades your keywords as relevant you will:

1… Get a higher click through rate (CTR)
2…Show up higher in Google’s search results
3…Pay less per click

Without going into too much detail it should be clear to see that keyword research isn’t as simple as everyone thinks!