Group Keywords By Relevance For A More Intelligent And Effective PPC Campaign

Keyword grouping is the one of the most vital and yet most often overlooked pay-per-click advertising activity. Grouping keywords for PPC brings exponential benefits to your paid search activities, since tight, well-organized keyword groups produce high-performing ad groups.

In addition, grouping keywords by relevance brings a host of other benefits, which include:

• Better click-through rates (CTR)
• More conversions, more sales
• Higher Quality Scores
• Low costs and cost-per-action (CPA)

The end result of effective and successful keyword grouping is improved search marketing ROI.

Why is Keyword Grouping Vital to PPC Success?

Keyword groups need to be closely knit and highly relevant for peak performance. Searchers are looking for ad text and landing pages that speak specifically to their search queries. By being highly-relevant, searchers are far more likely to click on your ads and follow through with a conversion.

A higher CTR will not only boost your sales, but it also leads to higher Quality Scores from Google AdWords, which results in cheaper bids. It's a revenue win-win.

Point being, effective, relevant keyword grouping will take your search marketing campaign to the next level in terms of more traffic, more conversions and lower ad spend.

What is the Best Way to Group Keywords?

Grouping keywords is all about segmenting and organizing your keyword lists into tight, relevant and semantically-related groups and subgroups. The deeper down you drill, and the more niche-specific you get, the better.

Start by assembling all your keywords in a spreadsheet like Excel. Now, using Excel isn’t the best way to organize your keywords (it can be slow and laborious). There are some tools out there that are better and automate the process for you, which you can find with a query for “keyword grouping.” But if Excel is all you have, that will do just fine for this exercise.

Once your keywords are assembled, begin organizing them by relevant terms. For example, let's say you’ve got a site about “dogs.” Your primary keyword group would be “Dogs.” Then, you’d create a sub group like “Dog Breeds” to assign breed-related keywords like “Terriers,” “Hounds” and “Retrievers.” After that, you could create relevant, more granular, niche cluster groups for keywords related to “Dog Diet,” “Dog Training,” “Dog Behavior,” etc and group them accordingly.

You’ve Got Your Keywords Grouped, Now What?

Okay, so you’ve completed the previous exercise and you have all your keywords organized into highly relevant groups. Now, you can use this grouping strategy to inform your landing page and ad text authoring for you PPC campaign. Point being, it's much easier to write specific and compelling ad text and copy around keyword groups segmented by relevance.

By organizing your keywords in this manner, you created a clear guide or “keyword map” which you can use to inform your content creation and ad group association.

Keyword Grouping: The Path to PPC Success

In closing, if you segment and organize your keywords into groups and subgroups (as your keyword database grows over time), you’re ensuring that your keyword groups and ad groups will continue to be as tight and relevant as possible. Doing this will keep you ahead of the curve in your PPC marketing efforts, resulting in more clicks and conversions and lower ad spend.