Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

Selecting the “best” keywords for your pay-per-click campaign starts with identifying all of the possible keyword phrases prospects might use to search for a solution like yours. This is a combo brainstorming & research effort.

Basically, you want to create a huge list and then narrow it down. Here are a few good tips to keep in mind as you create this list:

• Think like your customers. It doesn’t matter what search terms you think they should use. What matters is the search terms they really will use.
• List phrases – not single words. The most common length of search phrases used on Google today is 4 words.
• Include variations – For example, if you’re selling project management software, think about what else it could be called. Task management? PM Software?
• Add qualifiers such as SaaS, web-based, on-demand, asp, custom, off-the-shelf – whatever is appropriate for your product.

Start by brainstorming. If you’re already using keywords for search engine optimization, begin with those. Add anything you can think of that relates to your product or service.

Good sources of inspiration include:

• Your customers – ask them. (Wow, what a novel idea!)
• Your sales people, customer services people, your technical support people – ask them too.
• Your competitors. Look at the titles and tags on their web pages. I also recommend www.spyfu.com. This is an inexpensive service that will tell you what your competition is bidding on.
• Your web traffic reports. Any decent web analytics program will tell you what keywords are being used to find you.
• Trade magazines and websites, communities and forums frequented by your target audience.
• A thesaurus and a dictionary

Once you’ve compiled a list of every phrase you and your team can think of, you can use some free online tools to expand the list. (If you’re really serious about managing your own PPC campaign you’ll want to use a paid service or application, but for now you can get a good start just using the free ones).

Two of the most popular free services are:

• Free Keywords. This service is provided by Wordtracker, one of the most popular keyword research tools on the market.
• Google keywords.

With either of these services, you just type in keyword phrases and you’ll get a list of related phrases. Google also shows you monthly traffic for those phrases over the last 12 months. WordTracker gives you an estimate of daily search volume.

You may have heard of inventory.overture.com. This used to be a great service. After Yahoo bought Overture it continued to work for quite a while. Then it was shut down and then it came back. Then it went down again. (Are you dizzy yet?) That service is not working as I’m writing this article.

Organize your list. Now that you have a long list of potential key words, you need a place to keep it. I recommend putting the list in Excel or some other spreadsheet application. This will make the phrases easy to work with in the next step – which is where you’ll narrow them down based on relevance, popularity of searches and amount of competition.

We’ll talk about that in the next post.

Technorati Tags: keywords, key words, pay per click, ppc, search marketing, SEM, search engine optimization, SEO