Keywords for Google Adwords

Choosing Keywords for Google Adwords
As an Internet Marketing company Direct Submit are often asked to offer advice on selecting the most appropriate keywords for a clients Google adwords campaign.  We recently came across the following advice supplied direct from Google itself, so thought we’d include it in our blog. Hope this helps…

Keywords are the search terms (words or phrases) which trigger your ad, and they are critical to the success of your AdWords advertising. This email explains how you can choose the most effective keywords, assess your keyword performance and how this affects the amount you pay.

A great keyword is:

• Ideally, 2-3 words long
• Specific (keywords that are too broad or general will not reach users as effectively as keywords that are highly targeted)
• Directly related to the text in your ad
• Directly related to the page your ad links to (specified by the destination URL)

What keywords should I choose?
First, look at your website content and write down every word, word combination or phrase that describes each category of your business. This is the starting point for creating your keyword lists.

Include all brand and product names as well as plurals, synonyms and alternate spellings for each word or phrase. Capitalisation does not matter. Take out keywords that are very generic, irrelevant, or obscure.

Then, group your keywords into close-knit themes and create a new ad group for each theme. Put your keywords into these new ad groups. For example, if your campaign is for digital cameras, you can group together mini digital cameras in one ad group and SLR digital cameras in another.

Try using negative keywords. Negative keywords prevent your ad from showing when a word or phrase you specify is part of a search term. If you specify the negative keyword -repair, for instance, your ad won’t show for search terms such as digital camera repair.