Keyword Research 101: What You Need to Know!

Earlier this week, I wrote an overview on PPC campaigns. If you read it, you probably have come to the conclusion that keyword research is absolutely essential to any successful PPC project. Keyword research is a topic that is beaten to death by bloggers and PPC training sites. You can find a hundred different approaches out there. The truth is simple. All of those strategies probably work in one way or another. However, you don’t need all of those advanced strategies when you are getting started. Just like anything else, you need a solid basic understanding of the concept. That is just what I’m going to try to provide you here today. Keyword research should be your first stop when you are attempting to learn affiliate marketing through PPC training.

The three general phases when doing keyword research include brainstorming, competition, and testing. Affiliate marketing experts will release guides that get into the minutiae of keyword research, but you only really need to have a grasp on these phases to get started. It’s better to learn by doing instead of wasting time reading all the information available on a particular topic.

Brainstorming Phase

The first thing you’ll want to do for keyword research is to spend a good amount of time making a list of all the possible keywords and phrases that relate, even marginally, to your website or niche. One of the most profound things that I learned at PPC Coach is that I should be spending the most time during campaign creation on keyword research. Think about it; these words and phrases are going to make or break your project. They are the driving force for your project, so why not give the process a bunch of time to make sure you do it right?

After listing every word or phrase that you can come up with, start asking other people what comes to mind when they think of your product or niche. Their responses can offer great insight into what people are looking for when searching for a product, service, or niche related to yours. Their feedback is gold, so add any new keywords to your list.

Another way of coming up with keyword ideas is to visit competing websites and look for any common topics or themes. If you find something that is repeated often in their content, it means that those phrases are working for them. Add these to your list.

Competition Phase

After you have your master list of keywords, you want to research how realistic it is to compete for these keywords. There is no reason to go after a keyword that is already being dominated by a huge corporation with a budget that can crush you. You want to look for keywords that have a high monthly search volume while having a low-to-medium amount of competition.

I have seen many, many keyword research tools advertised on the web. The fact is that they ALL pull their data from one source: Google Keyword Tool. There is no need for expensive keyword tools when first getting started with pay per click. You can gain all the competition data you need from the free Google Keyword Tool.

Once you have ventured over to the Google Keyword Tool, you will want to enter each of your keywords one-by-one into the tool and see what kind of data you come up with. Each keyword search will provide you with how many searches it gets per month and how much competition exists. As a general rule of thumb, you want at least 1000 exact-match searches per month with low-to-medium competition. It may be helpful to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all this data and sort it according to your needs.

Along with the data for your keyword, Google will display a list of related keywords and their data as well. Take a quick peek at the list for each keyword and see if anything jumps out as something that will work for your PPC campaign. Add these to your list.

After completing your competition research, you should have a significantly smaller list of keywords that match your niche and have an acceptable amount of competition. These are the keywords you’re going to use for your campaign.

Testing Phase

The final phase of keyword research is testing. To start, you’re going to want to assign a budget for each keyword on your list. The budget will depend entirely on the product or service you’re selling through your website. If it’s a modest product cost ($5-$10), I would make each keywords budget about 1.5x the cost of the product or service. Keywords for products that are more expensive need to be researched more thoroughly. This process is beyond the scope of this article, but the idea is to set a budget that will give you enough of an informed decision on whether or not each particular keyword is converting for you.

Once you have determined your budget for each keyword, you can go ahead and run your campaign. Check your stats about once a day to see your activity. After a few days, you should have some significant data. Once you see that certain keywords are at or have slightly surpassed your keyword budget, you will want to see if they have converted in any sales. If they have, then you will want to “clear” their budget and start from scratch. If a particular keyword has surpassed its budget and has resulted in no conversions, then you’re going to want to cut it loose as soon as possible. There is no reason to keep a failing keyword, no matter how much you thought it would work.

Hopefully, after a week or so of running your campaign, you should have a good list of consistently converting keywords. These are your gold that you should defend with everything you are. Cut out all under performing keyword and throw your budget at the ones you know to convert.

Remember, keyword research is part science and part art. It will take time to get used to what works and what doesn’t. The steps in this article are meant to provide you with a solid base of understanding. Once you feel comfortable with the basic process, you will want to develop more advanced strategies. Many of these strategies can be found at PPC Coach.