Don't Mess With Google's Golden Rule

If you search the internet you will find many articles about top tips for Google Adwords however they are all meaningless if you don't get the first basic step right.

There is a simple rule that needs to be understood and once you've got it and applied it to your Adgroups you are in with a great chance for getting cheaper clicks and higher ad positions.

So what is this rule? I call it Google's Golden Rule.

It's simply this. Google loves relevancy.

Google has built it's success based on give searches what they are looking for and it did this by making sure the search results it displays are relevant to the keywords the searcher has entered into Google.

This rule applies to both Adwords results and the free search listings as well.

So if you can make your campaigns relevant you will be rewarded by Google with cheaper clicks and higher placed ads. In other words create a relevancy link between you keywords, your ads and your landing pages.

What do I mean by this? I simply mean that the keywords that you are using should appear in your ads and also on your landing pages. In fact your Landing pages should be optimised for your keywords.

Now you can't do this if you haven't set up your adgroups properly. The mistake many people make is that they don't group their keywords into related groups of keywords. Generally they just have great long lists of unrelated keywords in their Adgroups.

If you've got a great big long list of keywords under one ad group then it's going to be very difficult to be able to target ads to particular keywords and to target your landing pages to those keywords.

For example if you take a look at this list of keywords here.

mens shoes
mens new shoes
shoes for children
shoes for men
ladies shoes
childrens shoes
shoes for ladies
ladies new shoes

They are all about shoes and as you can see I've got a mixture of keywords around men's shoes, ladies shoes, and keywords for children's shoes.

If I tried to target my ads and my landing pages to this list of keywords it's going to be difficult to get men's shoes, ladies shoes and children's shoes into a single ad.

What I really need to do is to take this list and break it down into ad groups. One for men's shoes, one for ladies shoes and one for childrens shoes.

My advice to you is take along hard look at your adgroups and try to break them down into small, highly related keywords groups. Then right ads and landing pages for each adgroup that are particularly targets to the keywords in the adgroup.

Now one of the common questions I get is asked is how many keywords should I have in each adgroup.

And my honest answer is that there is no exact number. Remember what you are aiming for here. It's relevancy.

If you are keeping your list of words highly related to each other then it's really difficult to see how you could have keywords lists of say more than 20 keywords at maximum.

So there you have it. Google's Golden rule and how to apply it to your adgroups.