Pay Per Click - Choosing The Right Keywords – Part I

It is very important that you choose the right keywords for your PPC marketing campaigns out of the shoot so you don’t start with a crack in your PPC marketing’s foundation that will ultimately lead to a low, or even a negative, ROI. A very common mistake that businesses make when they first get into PPC marketing is giving into the temptation of just picking the top searched keywords in your industry to begin with.

This is tempting because they are generally the most searched on keywords and would provide a lot of traffic. And they plan on using them to start with and expanding their keyword list later if they see good results from the “basic” popular keywords. But they are also the broadest, and the most expensive keywords for your industry.

So when you get this “brilliant” thought in your mind thinking that it will save you time, and give you a taste of PPC marketing, think of a really loud pulsating siren going off in your ear and bright red flashing lights in your face telling you to STOP! DANGER! DEAD END!

This is most certainly the quickest way to get into PPC marketing, and the quickest way to burn your PPC campaigns to the ground, burning through your money getting little to nothing in return. And end up convincing yourself that PPC marketing doesn’t work, that it’s only for big companies that have huge advertising budgets that they don’t know what to do with, and you’ll get out of PPC marketing faster than you got in.

For example, if you are an internet web site hosting service, you don't want to begin by bidding on the keyword “web hosting”. Sure web hosting is what your business does, and that's the main keyword that people type to find your kind of service, but the cost likely be much higher than your initial return.

As of this writing, the keyword “web hosting” costs over $5 per click to be in the top two positions, (yes, that's every time someone clicks on your listing you would get charged $5 whether they become a customer or not.) And over $2 per click to be listed somewhere in positions three through eighth positions, obviously a really high cost per click, to high for most small or medium sized businesses to afford. And I don't recommend bidding on this keyword to begin with, and depending on your profit margins on both up front sales and the life time value of a customer, possibly never.

A much better keyword that is more likely to have a higher conversion ratio any way, and have a much lower cost per click is a keyword like, “cheap web hosting inexpensive” that costs any where from $0.40 - $1.00 per click to get in the top eight positions. And even that might be little to rich for your blood to start with.

There are many keywords that cost much less per click. I personally try to have an average cost per click of about $0.15 - $0.25 cents per click. Which mean that you would have a lot of keywords that cost $0.05-$0.12 cents per click, and a handful of keyword that might cost $0.30-$0.75 cents per click. But it will of course depend on your industry and what your profit margin will justify paying to acquire a customer.

You may be thinking, but that longer search phrase and other keywords like it get a lot less traffic than the keyword “web hosting”. You are right; it does get less traffic, a lot less! But believe me, there are thousands of keywords like this that when you build a large list of keywords like this collectively you have keywords that get a lot of people searching them.

None the less you will be using your main industry keywords that get a high search volume in your keyword mining process to build a more relevant and highly targeted keyword list. The PPC marketing game is a little different than traditional marketing; the more targeted the keyword the better. It’s nice to get a lot of traffic to your web site from the most popular keywords, but since you are paying for this traffic you want the traffic to turn into sales dollars.

Now I’m not saying not to use the most highly searched keywords, I just don’t recommend doing so to start with. So you have to slightly adjust your thinking when choosing which keywords to start with. We will cover how to use the more popular, highly searched, broader keywords too, because there is a lot of positive revenue that can come from them.

But you don’t want to put the cart before the horse on this one. You want to do it in a strategic way. So we’ll cover both how to tell when it’s a good time to bid on these keywords, and how to do it in a controlled profitable way.