Friday, February 24, 2012

Researching Keywords for Your Google Adwords Campaign

Let's imagine you're selling weight loss products. This is a very competitive market. First, start out with market research for the product. You'll need to determine a few things before you start:

Top keywords that drive traffic to your product (weight loss plans, green tea weight loss, fast weight loss, etc) Top bid prices for those keywords. The number of competitors for the keywords. Which keywords don't deliver sales/traffic.

Go to Google's keyword tool to start your keyword research.

Google shows 11,100,000 searches per month for "weight loss." As you can see, this word is very competitive. Please note that your list should be at least several hundred keywords, targeting broad and exact terms. You may want to come up with a few more keywords to target although I've found that entering your most basic keyword yields several hundred keywords that are very enlightening. So this is a rather bad example to help you get started with Google AdWords:

weight loss plans

green tea weight loss

fast weight loss

free weight loss program

quick weight loss

weight loss supplements

To estimate keyword pricing use Google's Traffic Estimator Tool. Take your main keywords and put them into the tool. You can copy and paste them all in at once. Then plug in the maximum amount you're willing to pay-per-click and your maximum daily budget. Google will give approximate prices for the keywords in the first three spots (select a country that you want to target).

Google gave $1.27 - $1.55 as the average pricing for the keywords, which is pretty good.