PPC Keywords: The Importance of Grouping and Managing Long-Tail Terms

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 campaign.

Read on to find out the importance of proper PPC keyword research and grouping, and how WordStream can streamline these processes and bring your PPC marketing efforts to the next level of keyword advertising awesomeness.

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Using a PPC Keyword Tool to Find Initial Keywords

Using a PPC tool provides immediate advantages to help you establish a list of PPC keywords. Rather than speculating based on what you know about your own business, you’re able to quickly find keywords in the hundreds for your offerings. What’s more, PPC keyword tools like Google’s Keyword Tool give you some comparative statistics to help you decide if you want to move forward with particular words on your list.

If you’re starting a PPC campaign from scratch and need a keyword base to build on, using a PPC keyword tool can be a great boost to get you started. Unfortunately, when it comes to truly expanding and growing your keyword list to its full potential (which can grow into the millions, believe it or not), this is where a typical keyword tool falls short. Since pay-per-click keyword tools tend to provide only popular, general "head" terms, you’re not getting the keywords that are going to give you the highest return on a modest investment – long-tail keywords.

The Importance of Long-Tail PPC Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the longer, highly specific, unique phrases that draw your most qualified customers to your site. Generally, long-tail keywords don’t draw high numbers of visitors per keyword, but when you add up all those long-tail terms, it actually amounts to more traffic than what's driven by the few most popular head terms. Plus, the people they draw are your best target audience, because they show more buying intent and are more likely to convert.

This puts you in a great position for PPC, because more specific keywords have less keyword competition in search and therefore cost less to bid on. In addition, they yield excellent results in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate.

In turn, high CTR improves your Quality Score, which further improves your search rankings and drives down the costs of your pay-per-click advertising.

However, it's difficult to uncover long-tail keywords with traditional tools for PPC keywords. When working toward a successful PPC advertising campaign, it’s impossible to harness all the potential variations on your basic keywords with a free keyword suggestion tool. You need a tool that works directly with your site’s own server logs and Web analytics data to discover actual long-tail search queries that your visitors are using so you can capitalize on these opportunities.

WordStream’s keyword management solution does precisely that – it mines your site’s traffic logs to show you the terms visitors have used to find you, helping you to continuously expand your PPC keywords base and channel those queries into successful sponsored search ad campaigns.

Grouping and Managing PPC Keywords

Once you’ve established an ever-growing 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. The most efficient and effective way to do this is through keyword grouping and organization. By semantically grouping keywords, you stay organized and can target your customers more successfully, thereby improving Quality Score and reducing bid spend.

WordStream’s PPC software uses strategic automation to allow you to retain full control of your data while avoiding getting bogged down in the laborious and tedious tasks 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.

The WordStream keyword management solution breaks through this ceiling, enabling you to continue stay organized even as your PPC keyword base grows into the millions. With our keyword grouping tool, you’re given suggestions for related keyword groups, and in just a few clicks, you can filter your keywords into targeted groups in a keyword hierarchy. WordStream learns from your choices and automatically filters new keywords into their appropriate groups, allowing you to refine your list over time and maximize ROI from your data.

Learn More About WordStream's comprehensive PPC Keyword Research and Management Solution

We've shown you the importance of proper PPC keyword discovery and management. To learn more about how WordStream’s keyword management software makes this possible, read our free white paper on PPC best practices.

You can also learn more about PPC keywords by browsing our huge collection of informative AdWords ebooks. They're packed with valuable tips on optimizing your AdWords campaigns to gain maximum profits, and they're yours to download absolutely free.