PPC Keywords: How to Find the Right Keywords for PPC Advertising

Where do you find the right PPC keywords, and how do you organize and manage them once you find them?

Using a PPC keyword generator or keyword tool can be helpful in jumpstarting your PPC keyword research and discovery process, but once you've found a batch of initial keywords, you need to be able to expand and continue to find the most relevant long-tail keywords for your PPC campaigns, as well as to eliminate the bad keywords that aren't an effective use of your PPC budget.

Read on to find out the importance of proper PPC keyword research and grouping, and how WordStream can help you streamline these processes.

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Using a PPC Keyword Tool to Find Keywords

Using a PPC keyword tool provides immediate advantages to help you establish a list of PPC keywords for your ad campaigns. Rather than speculating based on what you know about your own business, you’re able to quickly find hundreds of keywords that real people are using, with additional important data such as search volume, competition level, and estimated PPC costs for each keyword.

You can start with WordStream's Free Keyword Tool to get a list of PPC keywords. Just enter a topic or URL to get started, and you'll get a list of related keywords arranged by popularity.

To get more actionable and personalized results, you can specify your industry and country. Even better, connect your AdWords account to get personalized cost and competition data based on your real PPC metrics.

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Remember, you shouldn't necessarily bid on the most popular keywords, since those can be more competitive and costly. WordStream's Opportunity Score will help you prioritize and choose the best keywords for your PPC campaigns by showing you which search terms have relatively high volume along with relatively low cost.

Selecting the Right PPC Keywords

A well-organized PPC campaign will include a number of different types of keywords with different levels of intent, such as:

  • Brand keywords: These are keywords that include your own brand name. Brand keywords are a no-brainer; they tend to have very low costs and very high Quality Scores. In addition, they yield excellent results in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate.
  • Commercial keywords: Commercial keywords are the most valuable terms in your PPC arsenal. These high-intent terms are generally used by prospects who are closest to the "bottom of the funnel" and most likely to buy.
  • Broader, low-intent keywords: In order to expand your account and your business's reach, it's important to also bid on some broader PPC keywords that have low intent, but help you increase brand awareness. You can increase your conversion rate on broad keywords through remarketing strategies.
  • Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are the longer, highly specific, unique phrases that are often very low-cost and have less keyword competition. However, long-tail keywords often have low volume and limited impressions too.
  • Competitive keywords: It's a good idea to allocate some budget toward competitive keywords. This allows you to get your brand and offerings in front of people who are searching for your competitors' products or services.

All of these keyword types can and should fit into your pay-per-click advertising strategy.

Grouping and Managing Your PPC Keywords

Once you’ve established a base of PPC keywords, you need to be able to put them to use in an organized way that optimizes your time and money investment. Through proper keyword grouping and organization, you stay organized and can target your customers more successfully, thereby improving Quality Score and reducing your costs.

WordStream’s PPC software uses strategic automation to allow you to retain full control of your data while avoiding getting bogged down in the work traditionally involved with keyword upkeep. Most search marketers still work in spreadsheets, manually updating keyword lists and attempting to sort and make sense of data that quickly becomes outdated. Because Excel wasn't designed for this kind of work, eventually, the growing list becomes unmanageable, and your potential for keyword expansion disappears.

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Managing keywords with WordStream's 20-Minute PPC Work Week

WordStream Advisor helps you stay organized even as your PPC keyword database grows into the millions. With our keyword grouping tools, you’re given suggestions for related keyword groups, and in just a few clicks, you can filter your keywords into targeted ad groups. WordStream also surfaces keywords that are wasting your budget and not turning into sales, so you can add them as negative keywords and reduce wasted spend.

Learn More About WordStream's Keyword Software

We've shown you the importance of proper PPC keyword discovery and management. To learn more about how WordStream software makes this possible, sign up for a free trial.