How To Choose The Right Keywords For Your PPC Campaign

Nowadays, almost everyone searches online before conducting business! You may do it every day in your personal life. It could be searching for where to get your car fixed, a nice restaurant, or a million other things. It's also the same with business-to-business! People search online FIRST.

That's why pay-per-click (PPC) is a proven effective strategy for driving targeted traffic to your website. However, the success of your PPC campaign depends heavily on one major factor: choosing the right keywords.

Keyword selection plays a huge role in ensuring that your ads reach the right people at the right time while maximizing your return on investment. This blog post will discuss what PPC is, why it's important, and how to choose the right keywords.

PPC advertising is a digital marketing model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, hence the pay-per-click, you pay for each click you receive.

It's a way to buy website visits instead of organically receiving them.

When using a PPC campaign, advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that their target audience would be searching to direct them to their website.

When people enter those keywords into search engines, those ads are displayed. The order in which these ads appear, from the top of the search to the bottom, typically depends on the keyword bid.

One advertiser bids a certain amount on a keyword, while another bids a different amount.

Think of it as essentially an auction whenever someone searches a keyword competitor's auction for ranking. The highest bid appears first typically, but it's important to note other factors come into play, such as the quality of the ad itself. Appearing first is crucial as most users click on the first thing that appears and rarely go near the bottom of the search results or the second page.

A significant difference PPC offers compared to traditional advertising methods is the immediate effect it can have on your business. Traditional methods often take time to see the impact of a campaign, whereas PPC allows you to reach your target audience instantly. The second you launch your PPC campaign, your ads can appear in search engine results or relevant websites. PPC also gives you flexibility and control over your advertising budget, and you can set specific spending limits and adjust certain keyword bids as you see fit.

PPC platforms include but are not limited to Google Ads and Bing Ads, but other platforms, such as Amazon and eBay, deploy a similar advertising model. You can use PPC to promote your website anywhere online.

Platforms such as Instagram and Facebook differ as you pay per impression or pay each time someone sees your advertisement, essentially making it an online billboard. PPC is better because of how specific you can get, and each time you pay you are paying for a hopefully meaningful and qualified click.

PPC is important because, as we previously mentioned, it can be deployed and used instantly. While SEO and other marketing efforts can take months to get your business ranking high in the search results, PPC can do this quickly.

The instant visibility it offers helps companies reach their target audience at the right moment when they are searching for whatever product or service you provide.

It's excellent in driving specific traffic and is typically easy to measure results using various platforms.

Yes, ranking high matters in search results. A study done by Moz reported by Forbes found that the first five search results received 67.6% of traffic while the remaining 5 received only 3.73% of traffic. In other words you need to be in the top 5 search results.

Even with solid SEO, it's important to have PPC campaigns because a competitor could be using PPC to rank over you online, even if they have next to no SEO. Simply put, when you don’t use PPC, you lose clicks, and someone else steals your traffic.

Choosing the right PPC keywords is crucial to creating a successful PPC campaign. When selecting what keywords you will use, it's important to consider your target audience and what they would or should search for for your website's appearance.

For example we are Reputation Rhino, offering many services such as reputation management, search engine optimization, content development, website design… there is a lot we do! But for this example, let's only focus on reputation management for individuals. The keywords we would use are things like…

• Reputation management for individuals
  
• I need reputation management
• Help my reputation
• My reputation is damaged

And so on and so on! It's important to note there are specific phrases and broad keywords. If we were to set “reputation management” as a specific keyword, only when someone searches for that exact keyword would my ad appear. If we were to set it to a phrase, then if someone searched something like “I need help with my reputation management, " our ad could appear as it contains keywords in a phrase. If we were to set it to a broad keyword, it could appear when someone searches for pretty much anything with reputation management or similar searches.

In this case we would set it as follows…

Broad Keyword: Reputation Management

Phrase Keyword: Reputation

Specific Keywords: help my reputation, I need reputation management, my reputation is damaged, who can help my reputation, online reputation management, the best reputation management

We would add a lot more than just that but it's a basic example. When results start to be poor, we remove and block any keywords we don't want our ad appearing for.

Now, we are sure you are asking yourself, how do I generate keywords easily? Use these free tools below to generate keywords. You simply enter a starting keyword or your website's URL, and keywords will be generated, as well as stats on the keywords, such as average cost per click and how many search results it gathers.

• Google Keyword Planner
• Semrush
• Moz
• Arefs
• WordStream

There are hundreds of other tools online. However, we recommend you start with the Google Keyword Planner.

When bidding on keywords, most platforms can be set to bid automatically, but if you want to set specific bids on specific keywords, then be sure to use available tools like the ones above to see what it will cost to appear as a first result.

Bid more on keywords that are more likely to result in a sale, lead, or whatever you track.

The cost of a keyword can essentially be anything. We have seen keyword clicks be as cheap as a penny to as expensive as 50 dollars.

It all depends on the keyword and the competition for it.

When choosing your keywords, knowing the difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords is important. An example of a short-tail keyword is “reputation management,” an example of a long-tail keyword is “I need someone to help with my reputation management.”

Short-tail keywords offer high search volume, higher competition, generic search terms, and low conversion rates.

Long-tail keywords offer lower search volume, competition, and specific keywords but higher conversion rates. It is essential to use both types of keywords. Bidding higher on long-tail keywords is typically best practice. An easy way to discover your long-tail keywords is by going to Google, searching for something, and then seeing the autosuggestions.

Implementing PPC campaigns is crucial to the success of your business, even if you have great SEO. Always have some PPC campaign in place to ensure you rank high online when it matters.

When you do create your campaigns, allow yourself ample time to choose the right keywords. Plenty of free resources can help, like the ones we listed earlier, to name a few. When you select the right keyword, don't forget it’s an ongoing process, and your keywords will vary as results pour in.

Any further questions on PPC or related topics? Feel free to email or book a call to seek additional information, as we are always happy to help at Reputation Rhino.