It is very important that you choose the right keywords for your PPC
marketing campaigns out of the shoot so you don’t start with a crack in your
PPC marketing’s foundation that will ultimately lead to a low, or even a
negative, ROI. A very common mistake that businesses make when they first get
into PPC marketing is giving into the temptation of just picking the top
searched keywords in your industry to begin with.
This is tempting because they are generally the most searched on keywords and
would provide a lot of traffic. And they plan on using them to start with and
expanding their keyword list later if they see good results from the “basic”
popular keywords. But they are also the broadest, and the most expensive
keywords for your industry.
So when you get this “brilliant” thought in your mind thinking that it will save
you time, and give you a taste of PPC marketing, think of a really loud
pulsating siren going off in your ear and bright red flashing lights in your
face telling you to STOP! DANGER! DEAD END!
This is most certainly the quickest way to get into PPC marketing, and the
quickest way to burn your PPC campaigns to the ground, burning through your
money getting little to nothing in return. And end up convincing yourself that
PPC marketing doesn’t work, that it’s only for big companies that have huge
advertising budgets that they don’t know what to do with, and you’ll get out of
PPC marketing faster than you got in.
For example, if you are an internet web site hosting service, you don't want to
begin by bidding on the keyword “web hosting”. Sure web hosting is what your
business does, and that's the main keyword that people type to find your kind of
service, but the cost is likely be much higher than your initial return.
As of this writing, the keyword “web hosting” costs over per click to be in
the top two positions, (yes, that's every time someone clicks on your listing
you would get charged whether they become a customer or not.) And over per
click to be listed somewhere in positions three through eighth positions,
obviously a really high cost per click, to high for most small or medium sized
businesses to afford. And I don't recommend bidding on this keyword to begin
with, and depending on your profit margins on both up front sales and the life
time value of a customer, possibly never.
A much better keyword that is more likely to have a higher conversion ratio any
way, and have a much lower cost per click is a keyword like, “cheap web hosting
inexpensive” that costs any where from {content}.40 - .00 per click to get in the top
eight positions. And even that might be little to rich for your blood to start
with.
There are many keywords that cost much less per click. I personally try
to have an average cost per click of about {content}.15 - {content}.25 cents per click. Which
mean that you would have a lot of keywords that cost {content}.05-{content}.12 cents per
click, and a handful of keyword that might cost {content}.30-{content}.75 cents per click. But
it will of course depend on your industry and what your profit margin will
justify paying to acquire a customer.
You may be thinking, but that longer search phrase and other keywords like it
get a lot less traffic than the keyword “web hosting”. You are right; it does
get less traffic, a lot less! But believe me, there are thousands of keywords
like this that when you build a large list of keywords like this
collectively you have keywords that get a lot of people searching them.
None the less you will be using your main industry keywords that get a high
search volume in your keyword mining process to build a more relevant and highly
targeted keyword list. The PPC marketing game is a little different than
traditional marketing; the more targeted the keyword the better. It’s nice
to get a lot of traffic to your web site from the most popular keywords, but
since you are paying for this traffic you want the traffic to turn into sales
dollars.
Now I’m not saying not to use the most highly searched keywords, I just don’t
recommend doing so to start with. So you have to slightly adjust your thinking
when choosing which keywords to start with. We will cover how to use the more
popular, highly searched, broader keywords too, because there is a lot of
positive revenue that can come from them.
But you don’t want to put the cart before the horse on this one. You want to do
it in a strategic way. So in the next installments we’ll cover both how to tell
when it’s a good time to bid on these keywords, and how to do it in a controlled
profitable way.
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