Someone may say that keyword optimization is part of the general optimization process, and this is correct, but sometimes, even experienced PPC marketers tend to forget the basics. We like to concentrate on click-through rates, costs, and conversions and sometimes don’t pay the necessary attention to the base of the campaign or the keywords.
Let’s review 5 easy yet effective ways to optimize your PPC keywords.
1. Regular Review of your Negatives list
Negative keywords are one of Google Ads' most powerful features. When you set up an Adwords campaign, you define the keywords that will trigger your ads, but this doesn’t always work as originally planned. To get more views and clicks for your campaign, Adwords may show your ads for search queries with no business value.
Of course, this is not done on purpose; it depends on how you have set up your keyword match types, but still, there are cases where your ads are triggered for keywords you don’t want.
A classic example is when you sell a product and want to exclude people looking for ‘reviews’. Even if you use a broad match modifier to restrict the queries you get as much as possible, there will still be queries with the word ‘reviews’ in your search terms report.
Adding ‘reviews’ as a negative keyword eliminates this problem once and for all.
Reviewing the search terms report weekly and revising your negative list is always a good practice. This will improve your CTR and prevent you from wasting your budget.
2. Use exact match for high-volume keywords
When doing your keyword research, identify keywords that are highly relevant to your campaign and most popular in search volume. These keywords are candidates for use as ‘exact match’ keywords.
The exact match keyword type instructs AdWords to show your ads for queries that closely match your specified keywords. By close match, I mean they are in the same order: misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, and abbreviations.
For example, if you set these keywords as exact match (by enclosing them in []), [competition analysis tools], AdWords will only show them for queries that have the same words in the same order and meet the criteria explained above. It will show them for ‘competition analysis tool’ but not for ‘best competition analysis tools’.
Here are a few things to note about the use of exact-match keywords:
- Since they are highly relevant, they will raise your CTR, lower your CPC, and increase conversions if selected correctly.
- Don’t set keywords as ‘exact match’ with low search volume; use this type for your popular keywords.
- The more words (long-tail keywords) included in a keyword set, the better, provided they have a decent search volume.
- A good practice in cases where you have a lot of keywords that are a good fit for an exact match is to keep them in a separate campaign running with their budget. At the same time, it is very important to add them as negative keywords in your other campaigns to avoid your campaigns competing with each other.
3. Pause low-performing keywords
This is a really easy one. When you view your keywords report in the status column, you may see the message ‘Low Search Volume’. This means that the number of searches for that keyword was very low for the particular period, so AdWords temporarily made those keywords inactive.
When and if there are more searches for them, AdWords will re-activate them and put them back into the auction (the checks are made once per week).
The problem is that if you have a lot of ‘low search’ keywords in your account, this affects the overall performance of your campaigns, negatively impacting the other keywords and your quality score.
Google also suggests in its AdWords best practices guide that low-search-volume keywords be deleted, which will streamline and simplify your account.
4. Use Broad Match Identifier
The broad match identifier is one of the most powerful keyword match types, even more so than the exact match, and it can get you highly targeted traffic with less keyword management and trouble.
By adding the + in front of a keyword, you ‘tell’ Adwords that the particular word has to be included in the search query in any order. The good news is that you can add the + to one or more words in your keyword set.
For example, assume you sell diamond rings and have an ad group for your blue rings. The only keywords you need to add to that ad group are “+blue +diamond +rings”. By taking advantage of the modified broad match type, you immediately exclude searches that don’t have all three keywords, and your ads will only show up for highly related terms.
Why should you use a broad match identifier?
- Fewer keywords to manage
- Increase CTR and higher ROI
- Less negative keywords
5. Remove keywords not related to your landing page
A basic principle for high conversions is that your landing page should support your ads and keywords. This means that the landing page should be highly relevant and offer people what is promised in the ad, and at the same time, the content of the landing page should be highly relevant to the keywords in your campaigns.
There are cases where, during keyword research, you come up with some nice keywords that seem a good match for your campaigns, but the landing page may not fully support these. You like the keywords and add them, but as a result, you negatively impact your quality score, ad rank, and costs.
When you have multiple landing pages, this problem is easy to solve. You can add those keywords in separate ad groups, create highly relevant ads, and send users to the most appropriate landing page.
When you have only one landing page, adding keywords that are not highly relevant will affect your campaign performance. The solution? Either create separate landing pages for those keywords or remove them from your campaigns and concentrate on keywords that fit better with the page's content.
A good way to identify if you are facing this issue is to view the keywords tab and move your mouse over the speech bubble (in the status column).
If the Landing page experience is ‘below average,’ you must take action immediately. If it is ‘average,’ look for your quality score and review the keywords with the lowest quality score in the list.
Examine whether the landing page experience is the reason for a low-quality score. If so, try switching landing pages and monitoring the impact on the quality score.
Items missing from the list?
Regularly auditing your keyword optimization practices increases your chances of running profitable AdWords campaigns. What other keyword optimization checks should you perform regularly?
