Is your keyword list a stumbling block that’s holding back your profits?
Ours was, and when we fixed it our profits grew 76% over night!
Did you know that having a VERY deep keyword list can completely transform the performance of your AdWords account?
What do we mean by ‘deep’? (read keyword research the right way) Here’s an example. Let’s say someone has entered “meditation seminar in New York” into Google’s search engine. Of the following advertisers, which do you think is more likely to have their ads appear?
- • The one that only bids on the keyword “meditation” (with broad match selected)
- • The one that bids on the keyword phrase “meditation seminar” (with broad match selected)
- • The one that bids on “meditation seminar in New York”
The answer may surprise you. Just having broad match as one of your matching options is NOT good enough!
But why?
Because deep inside Google’s rules, there are two small clauses that state:
“For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position on a search results page we consider the relevance of the keyword and the ad to the search query.”
“For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad’s position on that site we consider the relevance of the ads and keywords in the Ad Group to the site.”
BINGO!
Simply put, this means that if the keywords in your Ad Group directly match the search query or the content of the site (for Google’s content network), then your ads are more likely to appear and more likely to appear in a high position.
How big a difference can this make? For just one of our accounts, the difference was about $212,160 in additional sales from Google AdWords per year! We literally stumbled upon this discovery, and here’s how. About 4 months ago, I decided to completely revamp the keyword list of one of my AdWords accounts. All I did was go deep… and I went really deep! (I did this by using a keyword research tool that we’ve built internally that helps us rapidly build a winning keyword list.)
For example, instead of just bidding on “meditation” and picking the top 100 keyword phrases, I added every keyword phrase related to “meditation” that our keyword tool found. In total, we found over 494 phrases. I repeated this for every single Ad Group in our account and expanded our keyword list by an additional 36,243 keyword phrases. Imagine that! I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier. And look at how our traffic and sales took off! Remember, in this controlled study we did not launch a single new Ad Group. The only difference was that we went deeper in building the keyword list to include as many keyword phrases as possible.
If you haven’t yet invested in a killer keyword research tool, now is a really good time I will recommend SemRush. These tools can literally pay for themselves in days! You’ll find it quite handy. We built our own tool because none of the free or paid services were going deep enough and they just weren’t finding enough high quality keyword phrases. (If you are really interested in the keyword tool we built internally, please let us know.)
