It all starts with think like your customers! What would you search for if you were searching for a product or a service that your company sells? This article will give you a brief insight of how to think and to come up with the perfect keywords.
The magic lies neither in being too generic nor too specific. The more specific you are, the more you limit the reach. Again, go back to how would you search for a product or a service?
Let me show you some examples from a search.
Let's say that I need to buy new jogging shoes. I might start with a generic search, which will give me a lot of results, but maybe not the ones that I was expecting.
Writing this article and searching for jogging shoes, I got only ads from one brand, Nike. Let's say that I would prefer Adidas, so I realize my mistake and type in jogging shoes Adidas. Now when I am more specific in my search query and when the company has their brand name mentioned in the ad I get the ads for Adidas in front of me. This is why it is so important to include well known brand in the keywords and the ads! As can be seen from this example, the more generic the keyword is, the more your company will compete with the big brands with lots of resources, both when it comes to time and money.
Again, if Your company had developed a new ergonomic jogging shoe. A jogging shoe that is still not known to the public. Then the focus should not be on the brand name, but on the qualities of those jogging shoes. This way your ads can be found because the search query matches the keywords, content of the ads and on the landing page.
Keywords
Keywords have traditionally, for many people, been looked at like one word at a time. Today long-tail keywords have become more and more important and this is not without a reason. So what is a long-tail keyword? Those are the three or four keyword phrases that are very, very specific to your products or services. When a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to know exactly what they are looking to buy. In general, these specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than generic search queries. The generic search queries tend to be more research that consumers typically do prior to making a buying decision.
Illustration of the Purchase Journey:
- The Consumer becomes aware of a product.
- Consumer seeks information about that product in preparation for possible purchase.
- The Consumer evaluates alternatives to product or service.
- Purchase decision-making.
- The Consumer decides to sign up, purchase the product or book a service
So what are the benefits of using long-tail keywords? The more generic a keyword is the higher the search volume will be, but also the competition and the cost for that specific keyword. Long-tail keywords are also much easier to rank for, and last, but not least, people searching using long-tail keywords are far more likely to actually buy a product or service. They are at the end of the funnel.
So, how do you know which keywords to go for?
If you are not familiar with Keyword Planner, I would suggest you to take a look at the functions included in this Google Ads tool. You can get historical statistics over how keywords have performed, as well as, forecasts for keywords with this tool. You can also find new keyword ideas for your Search Network campaigns that are relevant to your product or service.
Then the question arises, which keywords are my competitors using? One part of this research is also finding out the keywords that your competitors use. The effort to find the right keywords must include competitive intelligence research to determine which keywords you will be able to rank for based on the sites you have to compete against. This is where we can come in handy with our competitor research.
In the end, there is no substitute for doing a proper keyword research and determining which keywords have enough traffic to make them worth going after.
