A detailed tutorial on how to research your AdWords target keyword list to improve your ROI from PPC

Keywords trigger your ads. Building and maintaining the right list of keywords is vital to getting the best return on your paid search spend. Keywords are organised into ad groups. You assign ad creatives (ad text) to these ad groups, which appear when triggered by these keywords. Therefore, knowing which keywords will perform best is important. Keyword research is the process of building keyword lists, based on the frequency at which consumers search for these words and phrases.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keywords are the nuts and bolts of your AdWords campaigns. They let you control your visibility in search results, as well as affecting the amount you spend. If you’re setting up an account for the first time, it’s essential to build a robust keyword list as soon as you can. The quality of this list will…

How do your prospects really search? New research shows the need to go beyond simplistic keyword lists

This new research from Blue Nile is aimed at helping marketers better understand how people search online and to understand the patterns in how they formulate their searches through questions. For example, do they search using single words or short phrases or through longer questions including words such as 'How', 'When' and 'Which'? The research found that such question-based queries were common: '27% of respondents phrased their query in the form of a question, with ‘How’ being the most commonly used prefix.'

Can the Google Keyword Planner be misleading?

When using Google Keyword Planner, you need to seed the tool with one keyword or a short phrase. But the results returned often don't include the questions since they are diverse and their volumes are relatively low. So if you limit your understanding of search behaviour to this tool you could be missing out on…