Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Keyword Optimization Is The Key To PPC Advertising

It would be unwise to jump into Pay-Per-Click marketing without having a set of relevant keywords. Pay-Per-Click marketing is all about targeting specific keywords. Most prospects search for your products or services by typing in relevant "key words" into the search engine keyword toolbar in order to find the keyword search results they are looking for. The search engines show natural and Pay-Per-Click results after analyzing the relevance of those keywords.

A website that wants to rank high on the Pay-Per-Click search results, must have their most relevant keywords optimized they begin their Pay-Per-Click program. These sets of keywords are generated using several different methods and a variety of keyword tools such as the Google Keyword Tool.

This keyword list is generally segregated into groups of related keywords and keyword phrases which best match the core content of the website's landing page for which these Pay-Per-Click keyword groups direct them to. This landing page and its content should also be optimized with relevant keywords from your list in order to receive a higher relevant page rank. Also, the more relevant your Pay-Per-Click ad is, the higher its results and the lower your costs are.

Your list of keywords will be used extensively within your website and in all of your online marketing. Not only will you use this keyword list for your landing pages and its content, you will also use it to create your Pay-Per-Click banner ads; therefore, one of the worst things you can do is choose a wrong or unrelated set of keywords because this will lower the rank of your Pay-Per-Click ad while costing you more money, decrease the flow of traffic to your website, and have a severe negative effect on the conversion rate.

Due to the overall importance of selecting relevant keywords, Pay-Per-Click keyword selection is probably the most important task you will ever encounter in your online marketing efforts and this should not be left to someone who is NOT a professional. You must understand that if your keyword lists are not specifically designed to meet your exact marketing needs, you will never achieve the results that you desire and deserve with your hard-earned marketing dollars.

You must first set up you Pay-Per-Click account. Since Google Adwords is the most common PPC ad agency, let's assume that's where you'll start. First set up a Google Adwords account. Google will pretty much walk you through this, but a couple of key points. First, uncheck the content network button first (we'll discuss this a little later) and second, make sure you set up the optimizer for testing your ads against each other.

After you have set up your Google Adwords account, it's time to create your first ad group and ad. In order for you to get the best "quality score" you should remember two words, "relevancy" and "action". In other words, make sure you have your keywords grouped into specific ad groups based on their likeness and create your ad specifically for this one group. This will increase your groups "relevancy". Secondly, when creating your ad, make sure you ask for a specific "action", such as directing them to a specific landing page which is relevant to that specific group of keyword group.

There are also "negative keywords" that you should specifically designate within your Pay-Per-Click campaign. These are words that would cause a prospect to click through to your website, but that has no relevancy to your particular type of business. For example, you may think that the keyword "night stand" would be of particular interest to a furniture store, but in actuality a person was actually looking for a "one night stand". Obviously, a different profession!!

With more and more businesses using Pay-Per-Click marketing and getting a good return on their investment, it's becoming more difficult to maintain market share due to the increased competition and in turn a higher cost-per-conversion for you. But one way we have adapted is by using a Geo-targeted Pay-Per-Click campaign.

A Geo-targeted Pay-Per-Click campaign uses your keywords but targets a specific geographical area, such as Dallas or Texas. This is a great way for local businesses to can't or don't need to serve a national audience. Geo-targeted Pay-Per-Click ads also tend to get good quality scores which results in a lower cost-per-click and a higher return on investment.

Once you've set up your campaign, it's time to create your ads. You will be able to write as many four line ads as you'd like for each particular adword group. I would suggest starting out by writing two ads for each group and testing them against each other until you find a winner.

Obviously, as with any type of advertising, there are specific strategies that are most effective when it comes to writing ads. Here are some simple guidelines:

- Line 1 should contain your main keyword you are targeting and get attention

- Lines 2 & 3 should list specific benefits that your prospect will receive

- Line 4 should be a clear call-to-action

Once you've tracked, tested and tweaked your Pay-Per-Click campaign and ads where they're running smoothly, you'll want to expand your campaign to other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing as well as advertise on the content network within Google. The content network is where you can place text ads or banner ads on specific websites or specific types of websites that are related to your industry.

Setting up your Pay-Per-Click campaign can be a very labor extensive and expensive task if you don't know exactly what you are doing. A good Pay-Per-Click management company can be worth its weight in gold. Often the amount of money that you will lose due to poor keyword selection, bad ad creation, and improper testing can pay for a great company to manage your account for you.