Keyword Research: Two Mistakes That Are Easy To Make

Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, January 25, 2008

Keyword research is one of the first things you should do before you start a PPC campaign. It’s also one of the places where you can go wrong if you aren’t careful. Many new PPC advertisers make their first mistake while conducting keyword research. Quite frankly, it’s easy enough to do and even some expert Internet marketers make keyword research mistakes too.

When it comes to researching your keywords, don’t settle for the general keywords related to your niche. That’s where most newbies go wrong. The general keywords are usually the least profitable. Your most profitable keywords will be what they call “long tail keywords.” Those are the keywords that are not as high in demand but that can drive traffic to your website and help you close the sale. Search those keywords out. It’s worth the extra time it takes to find the right keywords for your campaign.

Another mistake new PPC advertisers make related to keyword management is using the broad match. Just because you’ve found the perfect long tail keyword doesn’t mean you should focus on that word in the broadest sense. Use the match types and single out the specific keyword. If your keyword research leads you to a long tail keyword phrase that is two or three words long then put those words in brackets or quotes. Otherwise, the PPC search engine will seize upon each individual word separately. But you want to target the phrase so be sure that you use the proper match type and target your keywords specifically.

Category: PPC Keyword Research

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2 Comments

Comment by Diana

Made Friday, 25 of January , 2008 at 2:59 pm

I can’t agree with you 100% on this post. The first tip, about using the long tail, I can get behind completely - which leads me to your 2nd point. You wrote Otherwise, the PPC search engine will seize upon each individual word separately - I don’t find this to be true.

Don’t you find that when you’re using a long tail keywords that you get better results with broad match than phrase or exact? The long tail are sometimes so long that broad match is how you catch them. If I have a long tail term, such as diaper plastic pants I am going to leave it broad matched because I want to capture those searches for diaper pants plastic or plastic diaper pants, and not strictly “diaper pants plastic”

At any rate, I am enjoy your posts and am linking this post to our team reading list.

Comment by Brick Marketing

Made Saturday, 26 of January , 2008 at 10:03 am

Thanks, Diana. You are correct. You can have a long tail keyword that is long tail enough on it’s own. I should amend this post to say that broad match is not recommended for most keyword terms, but if you are using long tail keyword phrases then you’ll have to make a judgment call. One thing you can do is test the broad match against the other match types and see which one brings you better results.