AdWords Keyword Research for Beginners
When you embark on your first PPC journey, you should keep a small number of keywords at the beginning. Keyword lists that are thousands of words long should be left to the most experienced PPC marketer. Ideally a beginner should use around 100 specific keywords, anything else will probably be too cumbersome to manipulate. If you can't harness the power of great keyword campaigns, your bank accounts will dry up. There are some very simple free techniques you can use to find specific keywords with little competition. A process for finding low competition niche keywords uses Google and Excel. More specifically, you want to use Google's keyword tool, just type this in Google and it will appear in search results.
When you get to the main page of the Google Keyword Tool, you will find a white box (field) where you want to enter your particular keywords. Enter a keyword for now to get an idea of how this works and hit Enter. After pressing Enter, you will be directed to a page of keywords that will be closely related to the keyword you entered. For the purposes of what we want to do, you will need to scroll to the middle of the page where the Add All 150 text is highlighted in bold blue. Below these words, you will see the words download all keywords with text, .csv (for excel) and .csv. You want to click on .csv (for Excel). By doing this, you will export this data to an Excel spreadsheet. The data, which only appears as green bars on the Google home page, will be transformed into numerical data that is much more valuable to you.
Once the data is in the Excel spreadsheet, you can start a simple analysis that will greatly benefit your PPC campaign. In the Excel spreadsheet, there will be columns of data, A-D. The columns will be, A-D, Keywords, Advertiser competition, previous month's search volume, and average search volume. The two columns we are interested in are the advertiser's competition and average search volume. What we want to do is merge the data from these two columns to give us a number that we can work with. So what we have to do is take a generalized average of these two to get a number that we will compare to a predetermined benchmark. It sounds a bit strange, let me explain a little more fully and I hope you understand. All of these numbers are in decimals on a scale from .00 to 1. The higher the number, the greater the competition (as expressed by the advertiser's competition numbers) and the greater the search volume (expressed by the average search volume). Ideally, we want low competition with decent search volume to target lower-cost, high-converting keywords. So to find these keywords we use a general reference number that will determine your competition and volume level. If the keywords go above the benchmark, we leave them that way, if they hover around the benchmark or fall below it, we want to capture them and include them in our PPC campaign.
To get our figures, which we are going to compare with a predetermined benchmark, we are going to take an average of the advertiser's competition column and the average search volume column. We want to do this for all the keywords that have been exported to the Excel file. And the way we do it is by typing a simple command in Excel and copying the command into the related boxes. So to start we find box E2 which should be blank, this is the first box to the right of the first value in the average. search volume box. So inside this blank box you want to write = average (D2, B2). This will automatically give you an average of those two numbers in this row in column E when you close the last one). Now to get all the averages for each keyword, you simply want to click on that box (E2) and expand the box while holding down the right mouse button. The boxes should fill with color when you drag down to the last box (there will be nothing in them yet). Then when you have filled the boxes with color to the last box, you want to lift your finger from the right click. When you do this, all the averages will appear in the charts. Basically you just copied the function across the boxes. So now we have all these averages. What do we do with them, what do they tell us?
Well, a good baseline average
learn about Excel functions that you may not yet know).
So now we want to take these keywords that fell below or near the benchmark and reconnect them to Google's keyword tool and hit Enter. Now, go through the whole process we just went through to get the keywords we just connected to the Google Keyword Tool. You'll want to take the average of the two columns mentioned above again, then get all the averages for all the keywords by dragging the first box down, and then compare against a .50 or .55 benchmark again. But now, because we found some more specific keywords to work with (resulting from the first data export to excel and taking the averages to compare to the benchmark), we should have more keywords that have a fair impact around the reference point and below it. . This is because we are working with more specific keywords and hopefully less competition. We are finding even more specific keywords related to the first set we find. This should produce a larger list of keywords that meet our benchmark. So now we can take the words that meet the benchmark here, and we can use them in our targeted PPC campaign. Of course, you will want to go through this list and make sure your keywords are appropriate for the particular items you are selling. This method will get you in the right direction for your PPC campaign.
