Search Marketing Trainer

Repeat after me: My keyword list is the cornerstone of my PPC campaign.

Many of us in "the biz" refer to search marketing as keyword marketing. The two phrases are interchangeable. Search marketing wouldn't exist without keywords.

If you already have a live PPC account, you may want to skip this section since I'm going to focus on building a keyword list from scratch. Some of the tools I list will benefit everyone though - even those of you who have a live campaign. A keyword list is a moving target. Like all of search marketing, there's no such thing as set it and forget it.

Step One - Establishing The Preliminary List

Everyone has their own methodology for establishing a keyword list. Keep that in mind when you read this because this is just the way I do it and I'm not claiming it's the industry standard solution or anything. I can pretty much guarantee you'll end up with an awesome starter list of keywords if you follow my lead here though.

• First of all, start brainstorming. Open up a blank Excel folder, or grab a notebook (if you like that analog crap) and jot down the keywords you most strongly associate with your business. This exercise works great if you can get some employees in on the exercise (for those of you with employees). Don't be shy about asking clients either - often the language of our customers differs from the language we use to describe ourselves.
• Use any industry and internal collateral you can get your hands on to come up with your list - this includes web log files and web site copy.
• As you build your list, make sure you start grouping keywords together thematically. This will help you tremendously when you're ready to actually build your campaign. Here's an example.

Sometimes categorizing terms isn't as straightforward as it seems. For example, the term "winter boots for women" could go in both the Womens Boots or Winter Boots categories. However, for this particular client, their main product was "Winter Boots" so I chose to put the keyword there since they had a big selection of products that matched this category. If you're really not sure where to put a term, then test it with different ad copy and put it where it performs best.

Step Two - Using Keyword Research to Expand Your Preliminary List

Once you have your core list of terms completed, you can begin expanding those terms using a couple of techniques and tools as follows.

• Learn from the competition. Do some keyword searches on Google and other engines and see who is ranking well. Visit their web sites and read through their copy to get more keyword ideas. Look at their keyword meta tags. Go on! It's okay, I won't tell. (you can view the keyword tag by right clicking on a web page and selecting "view source" in IE, or hitting CTRL+U in Firefox). The keyword meta tag is usually located at the very top of the page and looks like this:

  {{meta Name="keywords" Content="Boots,Women's Shoes,Shoes,Clothing,Shoes,Jessica Simpson,Steve Madden,Via Spiga,MIA,AK Anne Klein,Rocket Dog,Nine West,Biviel,Kenneth Cole Reaction,Earth,Tommy Hilfiger,Lumiani,ADI,Journee Collection,Vigotti,Lassen,Type Z,KORS Michael Kors,DKNY,BCBGeneration,Diba,Gabriella Rocha,Miss Sixty,rsvp,Arche,Sudini,Charles David,Lane,Luichiny,Matiko,Naughty Monkey,BearPaw,Fergie,Groove,Peter Kaiser"}}

  I got the above tag from Overstock's Web site - notice how they've listed a ton of brand names? This is good stuff! It provides lots of great ideas for building your own keyword list (not to mention some insight into Overstock's keyword strategy).

• Use Google's Keyword Tool to research new keywords. You plug a keyword or list of keywords into this tool and it will spit back a list of variations of that term that people have actually searched on. You can build a keyword list from this and export it as a text or .csv file. It's one of my key resources and is pretty self-explanatory. I highly recommend you go try it out - you'll be hooked. The tool also allows you to plug in a web page and it will come back with a list of terms derived from the content on the page (I find this a handy way to see if my landing page is relevant for the keyword I'm targeting).
• Pay to use someone else's keyword tool. I never do this because I find the above (free) methods work very well in creating a keyword list, but in case you want to go all out - the three tools that come to mind are WordTracker, Compete, and KeyCompete.

  These tools are excellent for competitive research (if you want to see what terms your competitors are bidding on) as well as keyword discovery.