I asked Ron Drabkin at Adisem to put together a few tips for those of you looking to get a little extra bang for your Google AdWords bucks. Take it away, Ron.
Many online advertisers are surprised and dismayed at the prices that are currently being charged for keywords in Google AdWords (and Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc.) As anyone who has watched Google’s stock price can guess, the prices for keywords have indeed been going up over the last year in particular.
One fairly easy thing advertisers can do for little to no cost is to expand their list of keywords. Typically the price you pay for click/conversion will drop if you add more keywords, since more specific keywords are in most cases cheaper, since there are less bidders for each.
Here are some tips on finding more keywords for your site.
1. Pull up your own website, and that of your competitors, and read them. You very well may have phrases on your own site that you haven’t realized would make very good, targeted keywords.
2. Try one of the keyword generation products. The one I use personally is Keyword Discovery by Trellian (www.trellian.com), which has a free trial. These tools are good for finding popular tweaks and misspellings that you can add.
3. Decide if your offering fits city and interest pairings. You may want to take a list of all the cities in the US, or wherever your focus is, and pair them with interests. The online travel industry does this is the segment with probably the best keywords on the internet. So type in some words like “Cabo Hotels” or “Phoenix Vacations” into Google and watch the ads that come up for ideas on how you might do it.
4. Think out of the box to create different, unique keywords. Here is one example. I thought off the top of my head that “find a party” is a good keyword phrase. I just went to Google and there is only one ad on this keyword phrase, and it is not from a dating site. Google tells me that there is some significant traffic on this keyword phrase. Is this a good keyword? I don’t know, but I am sure that Dave or any of you could tell me.
5. You may want to buy keywords that are your competitors’ names (so if you are working for Ford, you might buy the keywords “Toyota, Camry, Solara, Corolla, etc.) It is not a classy move, but is common. Or, you can buy keywords of near competitors, paired with ads that tell the difference between your site and theirs. (Example, if you are advertising a speed dating service, you might buy keywords that are for regular dating, and your ad would simply say “try speed dating instead.”
6. Make sure you have found keywords for different languages, or groups that have their own slang. As an example, I looked at the keyword “Pinay” (which means something like Philipina, in Tagalog – I think), I found an ad for True.com, but no other dating site. “Pinoy,” which I believe to be the masculine equivalent, gave me no dating sites.
7. Think if you want keyword substitution. It can be the subject of an entire other article. Simplistically, when you type a keyword into Google, and see that some of the ads on the right have the keyword you typed bolded in their text ad, it is because their advertiser has keyword substitution turned on. I am happy to discuss this with any readers who are curious.
Anyone who would like to discuss this with Ron is welcome to contact him, contact info is at www.adisem.com.
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