Be Careful Not To Get Lost In The Keyword Candy Store
I just watched a very interesting video from Glenn Livingston (see below) that talks about the advantages of focusing only on a handful of keywords that are most relevant for your market instead of adding hundreds or thousands of keywords to your PPC campaign.
Glenn explains that in order to improve your ROI, it’s better to focus only on a few keywords that are most relevant to your market and to optimize your site for those keywords. If you use too many keywords, it will become impossible to properly optimize your site for all those keywords. And for many of your visitors, your site (or landing page) will no longer be relevant and they will leave without taking the desired action.
Glenn’s arguments are very interesting and I will most probably try out his strategy for one or the other campaign. Up until now, I did pretty much the opposite of what Glenn suggests: I build campaigns with hundreds or thousands of keywords. But I have to say, this works pretty well for me.
If you already created a few PPC campaigns, you will have realized that actually only a small number of keywords are responsible for the majority of sales or leads generated. And it’s not so easy to figure out what those keywords are.
And that’s the reason why I like to create campaigns with lots of keywords. I constantly test and track my campaigns, I delete non-converting keywords, I create dedicated landing pages for highly converting keywords, I constantly split-test my ads for highly converting keywords, I add new keywords, and again, I keep on deleting badly converting keywords… you get the idea.
I finally I end up with a highly optimized campaign that shows the following characteristics:
* Few highly converting keywords with an extraordinary ROI. I care a lot about those keywords. For most of them, I create a dedicated, highly optimized and split-tested landing age. And I never stop split-testing and improving my ads for these keywords. Sounds a lot of work, but it’s not really, because there aren’t many of those “killer” keywords.
* Tons of relatively low converting keywords. They are still profitable, so why should I delete them? On the other hand, it wouldn’t be time- and cost effective to create a unique landing page for all of these keywords. Most of them use to the same landing page and the same ad description with the keyword itself as the ad headline. But of course, I keep on split testing the ad description for these keywords – that’s only one split-test for a group of hundreds of keywords, so that’s not a problem.
If you want to use this strategy, I recommend you download my free PPC Campaign Builder Software to speed up the setup of your campaigns.
But again, there is no single strategy that works best for all markets, products, niches… So you might want to try out different things. Just don’t forget to test, test, test… otherwise you are loosing out in this game.
Part 1: Glenn Livingston: Keyword Candy Store
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