How to do Keyword Research and Planning for Google Ads

Keyword research and planning is the essential foundation to a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign on Google Ads. Effective preparation helps you to maximise your budget and return on investment. This might not sound like a great deal of fun, but creativity and experimentation are the keys to discovering those longtail keywords that drive customers to your website!

With that in mind, here are our six steps to keyword success…

Six Steps to Keyword Success

1) Competitor Analysis

Careful competitor analysis is fundamental to rolling out any new campaign and it can save you a pretty penny too! There’s a whole host of powerful tools available to conduct competitor analysis, including Auction Insight in Google Ads. Explore which keywords are currently working well and maximise your ROI by researching how much you should be bidding.

2) Get Creative

Explore every opportunity by having a brainstorm session. Why not get the whole team involved? When brainstorming relevant keywords, include direct synonyms and other related words. The more ideas at this stage the better! Don’t worry about building one big list, because you will edit and refine this. Be experimental – consider adding location, brand, competitor terms and your service differentiation, e.g. “free delivery”.

3) Time to Expand

Think you’ve found every possible keyword? Think again! Good keyword research tools can help. There are many highly sophisticated tools out there, but we recommend keeping it simple with Google’s own Keyword Planner. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and discover new and unique search terms.

4) What Makes the Cut?

By this point you should have a fairly long list of potential keywords. But which ones will make it through to the final stage? With many different search term variations, you’ll need to take some time to whittle them down. During this process, look for those keywords that are most relevant to your specific offering.

5) Group Together

Once you’ve condensed your list, you now need to group together your keywords into Ad Groups. Ad groups are the keywords that someone can search for to find a particular campaign – whether that be kitchen appliances or trips to New York. Grouping helps you to determine your bidding strategy as well as your most valuable keywords.

6) Stay on Trend

Once your PPC campaign is live, don’t forget to keep on top of Google Trends. This will help you to quickly establish the popularity of certain keywords at any given time. This could be as a result of many factors; a prime example is the surge in searches for “home workout equipment” at the beginning of lockdown in March / April 2020.

Maximising Your ROI

Any successful Google Ads campaign requires a reasonable investment of time in the planning and research stage. However, if well spent, this time can transform your business’ digital opportunities and maximise your return on investment.

Get expert advice when looking at pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, it can be an expensive lesson if done wrong and the more you try to do it yourself, the more complicated it all becomes.

PPC Marketing thoughts from Yorkshire Powerhouse

Have you any questions?

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