Any Google Adwords advertising campaign starts with the keywords – it they’re not right or not used effectively, you’ll spend money but not get the impressions, ad position and conversions you were so looking forward to.
We’re going back to basics to give you some easy-to-implement tips about using keywords effectively in your campaigns, from choosing your keywords and developing tightly related adgroups, through to advert and landing page relevancy.
1.Choose Your Keywords
There’s nothing like using a bit of common sense as a starting point – brainstorm some keywords relevant to your business with your colleagues. Keep asking yourself – what are normal people likely to search for if they want something you have to offer.
Google search – start adding your brainstormed keywords into Google search and it will highlight commonly searched terms. For example, imagine you want to promote your great wedding venue in Scotland – you can see the kinds of things people are looking for.
You can also use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner which is accessible in your Adwords account under Tools:
Then “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category“. For ideas around “Wedding venues Scotland” you may find some ideas relevant to your location; others may not be relevant at all.
Also bear in mind the number of monthly searches, and how competitive the keyword is – high monthly searches with low competition are the golden nuggets to find!
If you have a wedding castle venue near Edinburgh, you could include adgroups around “Edinburgh castle wedding”, “Edinburgh venues” and “getting married in Scotland” in your campaign.
2. Create Tightly Related Adgroups
A fundamental requirement in Google Adwords is to ensure that your keywords are reflected in your advert, and also in the landing page you will send visitors to.
The more relevance between the three, the more likely the keyword is to be assigned a good “quality score” by Google. And keywords with good quality scores are more likely to trigger your advert being shown in search results, and at a lower cost per click.
The easiest way to achieve this is to break your campaigns down into tightly related adgroups – where the keywords are all complementary to one another. Using a mix of keyword modifiers and slightly different ways to say the same thing are the best way to achieve this.
Google is very helpful in this matter. As you add keywords to your Adgroup, it will come up with suggestions. You simply need to make a common sense judgement whether these keywords are suitable if you want to keep the adgroup relevance “tight”.
It’s also important to avoid keyword duplication across adgroups and campaigns because identical keywords compete against one another. By keeping your adgroup keywords tightly relevant to one another, unplanned duplication of keywords will become a thing of the past.
3. Create Relevant Adverts
It’s essential to ensure the main words from your keyword list are shown in your adverts – the more relevant the advert is to the person’s search terms, the more likely they are to click on your advert.
If your advert is too vague and doesn’t closely match what people are searching for, 1) Google probably won’t show it, and 2) if shown, few people will click on it.
At the other end of the scale, don’t use ads to insinuate you have what the searcher wants (when you don’t), just to encourage click throughs to your website in the hope they will change their mind. You’ll simply exasperate the searcher and your landing page bounce rate will be high – a signal to Google that your advert doesn’t fulfill its promise.
The best adverts which have high impressions and high CTRs (click through rates) are relevant, informative and create a desire in the searcher to find out more about what you offer.
With the new extended text Google Ads you have more scope with what you’d like to say.
Try out a few variations, such as:
Also create some adverts which have use a Keyword Insertion option which you create like this:
{KeyWord:Your Great Headline}
This is a nice sneaky trick that Google uses automatically to replace the “code” with the keyword that triggered your ad – making the advert appear even more relevant to the person’s search.
Read more here about keyword insertion.
4. Create Ad Extensions
Unfortunately many Google Adwords newbies don’t bother with ad extensions – which is a mistake. They can improve the visibility of your advert, and result in more clicks.
Simply click on the Ad extensions button and you’ll see a list of options.
If you’re not sure what the different options mean, check out the Google advice here.
For a wedding venue, you may wish to emphasise your offerings with these types of callout ad extensions:
5. Create a Relevant Landing Page
Whether you direct your visitor to your website or a landing page specifically created for your Adwords campaign, bear in mind that Google needs to see it as being relevant to the searcher’s keywords.
This makes complete sense for a good user experience – if someone is specifically searching for a castle as a wedding venue in Edinburgh, they want to find plenty of information about your castle, your wedding planning experience and proximity to Edinburgh right on the page they land on.
So not only should the landing page have keyword-rich content that matches your keyword campaign, you should also optimise the URL and alt text on any images to supplement the relevancy signal you are sending to Google.
The landing page should also have very clear CTAs (calls to action) to enable the visitor to contact you / make a booking / purchase from you, as appropriate.
In summary, the keywords you use in your Google Adwords campaigns must be thought through carefully from the moment you plan the structure of your Adwords account. We see many clients who have far too broad a mishmash of search terms in one adgroup – and of course it becomes impossible for the adverts to closely relate to all of these.
Spending some thought and time on your account structure is essential if you want to your ads to get high impressions, if you want them to closely match what the searcher is looking for, and if you want the landing page to generate more conversions.
If you don’t have the skills or resources to run your own Google Adwords campaign, Blinkered offers a Pay Per Click advertising service. Just contact us for a no obligation chat.
