google adwords: how to choose keywords the easy way…well, sort of

If you are using Google Adwords or any of the other online marketing platforms then you are already aware of the importance of keywords in advertising. The choice of the most appropriate keywords will allow you to have more impressions, more clicks and generate enough revenue. It will ideally be a good return on your marketing investment.

One of the important but hardest task is to choose keywords that perform well…and how to go about doing it. There is really no right or wrong way in doing this. The important thing to understand is no matter how you choose it, you should have a good way to measure the performance of the keywords.

One simple but effective way is to measure the return on investment. Does the keyword produce more revenue than the cost of marketing for that particular keyword? It is easy enough to calculate if you sell products or goods directly from the website. If it is a content rich site, such as a blog then you will need to some other measure that the is specific to the website to calculate your return on investment.

One of the important factors for a successful marketing campaign is the co-relation between the keyword, search query and the landing page. The keyword should have a positive co-relation to the content of the landing page. There are several different ways you can go about to select the keywords to use for marketing. There are two distinct strategies you can use to get there: Start with the landing page or start with a specific keyword.

Start with the landing pages and generate keywords

If you already have a landing page that you want to advertise then you need to find keywords based on the content of the landing page. Marketing platforms and especially Adwords calculate the relevancy of the keyword by analyzing and matching the keywords with the page content.

You should analyze the content of the webpage and then extract the relevant keywords from it. You can also further optimize the text content on these selected keywords.

This strategy works best for e-commerce websites that sell products or services. It is quite possible that you already have a page that lists the product or service, often multiple pages for different products. An example would be an e-commerce website like Amazon or Ebay.

Tools to generate Keywords

You can use keyword tools that accept URLs or webpages as input. These tools will parse the webpage content and generate a list of keywords that you can use to market. The Google Keywords Tool is a good example for this purpose. WebSEO keyword analyzer is another tool which does something similar. A simple search should give you more options.

Ask Others

It is also a good idea to ask others, such as friends and family. Ask them to perform searches to find content that are similar to your webpage. The search queries that they come up with are good examples for the keyword you want to target while advertising.

Start with keywords and generate an appropriate landing page

If you do not have an existing webpage, then you can start with a keyword that you want to market. You will then create a landing page which is appropriate for this keyword.

This is especially true in the case of content websites such as blogs or a business website. You would probably want to choose a keyword that does generate a lot of searches and impressions. You can use tools such as Google Keywords Tool to generate and choose variations of the keywords as well.

After you have decided on the keyword, you will create a webpage (for example a blog post) that is highly optimized for the selected keyword.

Choose several “Root” keywords

Start with a simple root keyword. These are usually single words that generate a lot of searches. Treat this keyword as the primary or root keyword. It is not usually practical to market directly using this generic keyword due several reasons, such as it is not specific and targeted and thus will probably blow your budget with out much return.

You should try to come up with more than one root keyword.

Generate Variations and Synonyms

Starting with the root keyword, generate several different variations and synonyms of the word. Also, try to generate several long tail keywords based on the original root keyword. These can be much more targeted and easily marketable.

Repeat this process will several different root keywords.

As I mentioned earlier, there is no right or wrong way. The best way is to try it out for a while before deciding whether to continue using the keyword by measuring its success. You will need to regularly keep modifying and updating both your keywords and your content to stay relevant and effective.