← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
2025 Keyword Research & Imposter Syndrome (Episode 456)
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Chris
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. Specifically, I have two topics I'm going to hit today. First one is going to talk about keyword research in 2025. How do I do it? How should you do it? Well, those are different questions. Maybe the way you do it is a little different than me, but I'm going to describe in detail how I do my keyword research for every Google Ads campaign that I run and give you a specific example of how it works. So stay tuned for that. That's at the top of the show. And then later in the show, I'm going to discuss a topic that I think is destructive to every Google Ads campaign and that is imposter syndrome. When you suffer from imposter syndrome, I think you end up doing a lot of damage to your account and you should stop doing that. So I'm going to talk about what that looks like, what it means, and we're going to jump into that as soon as I tell you about my sponsor, opteo.com PSP that is the special URL that's o p t e o.com PSP to get your 28 day free trial of this tool. I have talked about it for years. It is still the world's best Google Ads management software, period. If you need to improve your search campaigns, shopping campaigns, even performance max campaigns. And it also works on Bing as well. Microsoft ads. You can run amazing optimization methods through this software. It guides you on how to change your bids, your budget, your keywords, your negative keywords, all of the dials and switches and levers that are hidden throughout Google Ads. How do you know you have the right combination of those optimizations? Well, Opteo guides you through the process. I even talked about recently the special Ngram Finder tool, which helps you identify search terms in your account and it simplifies the negative keyword process for apply negatives to customers, combat wasteful search terms. And this is something revolutionary that could change everything about how you manage your Google Ads account. So that's one part of the massive tool that Optio provides and you can try it. Did I say this for free for 28 days? Optio.com PSP all right, let's jump in with probably one of the top five questions people ask about starting a Google Ads campaign. Maybe even you've started one and you realize you need to restart, you need to start again. This time I'm going to do it right, you say, and I'm going to start with some keyword research. I'll tell you. I mean this is 2025. You hear people say, you know, do your research and research. I always laugh because what is, what is, how do you research something? And I don't have an answer for you if it's not Google Ads, because that's what I specialize in is Google Ads. So I'll tell you what research looks like in Google Ads and we're going to go through a specific process. I have seven steps to how to do your keyword research in Google Ads and I promise you it is simple. I won't say it's the most simple because there might be other people that have a more simple process, but I'll tell you, those people are probably using some kind of paid software. My research process does not use software. It does not use anything that goes outside of the Google Ads system. In fact, I don't even use the Keyword Planner. It's not something that I find to be useful. I find it to be quite overwhelming, cluttered, confusing, multiple steps and ways you can kind of screw it up. My method is a seven step method for keyword research that anyone can do. I've explained it more times than I can count, so. So I'm going to explain it one more time because I think it's important. I think it's important because people get it wrong all the time. Step one, how to do keyword research in Google Ads first does not happen in Google Ads. It happens right here in your head. Piece of paper, whatever you want to use first, pick one service or a topic or a product that you want to focus on. The wrong answer here is, okay, Kris, that's my business. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Your business provides a service or a product, but that service can be interpreted in different ways. I want you to go down the path a little bit and choose a service, product or topic of some kind that is specific to how someone is searching for it. Right? So I'll get more into that in a little bit. But the important thing about number one, if you mess up number one, it'll screw up everything else. You'll end up with a mess at the end. So number one, as all my rules and processes go, number one is always the most important. If you stray from this rule, it will mess up everything else. Um, so once you've picked that, and by the way, stick around a little bit later, I'm going to give you an exact example of this process. So I'm going to go through the rules and Then I'm going to do an example build of what keyword research looks like, okay? So stick around. Step two is once you've chosen your topic, your service, your product, choose two or three phrases that represent a person that needs that product or service, okay? Warning. These phrases are not just the product or service itself, right? If you do, if you're a dentist, the word two or three of these phrases that you've picked is not the word dentist, okay? It must include some kind of action term, okay? You must choose two or three of these phrases. I'm not even calling them keywords yet. They're just ideas. They're phrases. They're testing ground. Okay? Has to have some kind of action term. So for dentist, it might be at least better to do dentist near me. Even better would be kids dentist near me, or children's dentist, plus a city name attached to it, right? So it's important that these phrases that you come up with have some kind of action term. They're adhering to the first rule, so they're very specific to the topic, service, or product that you're, that you're choosing. And they're not one word. They're probably not two words. They should probably be three or more words, okay? So that's step two. Step one. Choose your service products or your service product or topic that you're building upon. Pick two or three phrases that represent a person that needs that product or service. Number three. Put those keywords, those phrases that you came up with, into a new ad group. Okay? This is where it gets very practical. You know, I'll give practical advice. Put them in as broad match. We are not discussing phrase match. We're not discussing bids. We're not discussing ad copy in this discussion. It is just keyword research. So I want you to put them in a new ad group. Build a new ad group and put those phrases, those two or three phrases, those two or three keywords that you came up with, put them into that ad group, broad match. And each keyword should be three words long, not six or eight. I don't want them too long. But they need to be something with an action term in them, some kind of qualifier, some type of adjective or specification that keeps them from being just the word, right? You're not a dentist. You offer dentist services. So this should be explaining the dental service itself. All right, next, number four, create an ad. This should be very fast. I am not asking you to write the best ad you've ever written. I'm asking you to create a placeholder Ad put a couple of headlines. Technically you have to have three. As of this year, you have to have three headlines that you've written. So write those three headlines. They could just be dentist. Great service call now. I don't care what the ad says, just get it written. The important part is that you take whatever page you're sending people to and make sure you include that in the final URL of the ad that you're writing. So if you're a dentist, it's your dentist homepage or it's your dental service for children page that you have, okay, Pediatric dental services or whatever. Okay, so you've written this. So now when this is done, when it's all over, you should have two or three keywords, Broad match in a brand new ad group, one ad in that ad group. I don't care what kind of bidding strategy you have, it just should be broad match, a few keywords. So very, very basic. Anyone I think could follow this once you've done that? We are now on step five. We're going to use Google's keyword suggestion tool. This tool does not have a technical name because it's not technically a tool that Google labels, but it is a tool I have used for a couple of decades. I guess at this point it's really the only keyword suggestion research tool that I like because years and years ago it used to be a little bit different. But the same rule applies that has always applied. This keyword suggestion tool gives you relevance based suggestions using your keywords and the ad that you've written. So you see why I go about this method. The fifth step is to use the key to let Google use the keywords that you wrote and use the ad that you wrote with the URL and to give you new keyword suggestions. So how do you get to this tool? You hit the plus button in the keyword tab. So if you're viewing the keyword tab, you just created those keywords, go back to that same screen, click the blue plus button. There will be over on the right hand side of the screen a list of relevance first suggestions. So what this tool does is it gives you additional keywords based on the relevance of those keywords to your original keywords. So as I said, stick around. I'm going to give an example of how this looks and I'm going to show you how I see it and how you should see it. Number six, choose keywords that fit the theme of that ad group. So step number one, remember you picked a theme, a topic, a product, A service. So step number six refers back to that, go back to that theme and only choose keywords that match that theme. These keywords in this relevance list that Google's providing you should be three, four words long, right? And that's what's great is most of the time the keywords Google's going to suggest are going to be very relevant, heavy, they're going to be very specific, very targeted, based on the keywords that you've written. And again, don't just do the word dentist. You probably don't want to do dentist near me. That might be a little too broad. So be as specific as you can because if you're very broad here with your generic keywords, you'll suffer by spending more money and getting less results. And then the final step seven, keep an eye out for negative keywords. I can't give examples of this exactly, but I will in my process that I'm going to go through right now. So let's go through it. And I've already done this ahead of time. I've already used my own steps one through one through seven to create a, to do some keyword research for a fictional tree removal service in Dallas. Okay? So that's my number one. My number win is the number one is I've chosen a service and that is tree removal in Dallas. The company is an arborist. It's an arborist company, right? So I don't, I'm not choosing arborist, I'm doing specifically tree removal. It's not pruning, it's not stump grinding, it's not limb trimming, it is tree removal, most specifically dead tree removal. You know, trees that need to be cut down, problem trees, stuff like that. Okay? So I've chosen it and I've defined what it's not. And I've defined it, defined what it is, and that's all in my head. Okay, step number two, I'm going to choose two or three phrases that represent that service. Okay, so my three are tree removal services near me. Dead tree removal, tree removal, Dallas, Texas. Those are my three. You'll notice that I kind of change the order up a bit, but they're all pretty much the same kind of term. And I just guessed, I didn't do any hit, I didn't do any, I just kind of guessed. Like this is probably how people would search. You know, people that are looking for my service would look for words kind of like this. Alright, so I, step number three, I put those keywords that I wrote into an ad group. Step Number four, I go in and write an ad. So these steps are, you know, step three and four should be really fast. I write an ad, and then step number five is where the magic research actually happens. I use the keyword suggestion tool. I go back, hit the plus button on the keyword tab, and boom, there will be a long list of suggested keywords based on relevance. Now, this is what my list looks like, and I'm going to go through it line by line and tell you which ones I like and which ones I don't. There are several here. Think about 15. First one says tree service near me. Don't want it. I do not pick that word. Let me explain why. Tree service near me is very generic. Is that tree removal? No, not necessarily. Is that tree trimming? No, not necessarily. It's tree service. Right. This very first suggestion is so generic it could essentially cover all of your services. This is not what I want. I am not putting tree service near me as a keyword in this. It's not relevant. It's too broad. It will end up diluting my entire ad group. So I skip it. I don't add it. Next one is tree removal near me. Perfect. I'm going to add that in. I like that one. Four words. Perfect. Next one is tree trimmers near me. Absolutely not. I'm not interested in the trimming. Next one is tree cutting service near me. Right. What does that mean? Does that mean cutting it down or cutting limbs? I'm not really sure. So I'm going to be a very cautious business owner and I'm going to opt to not target that. I'd rather have less keywords than more. Okay, so I'm not gonna do tree cutting service near me. The next one is stump grinding. Nope, that's not what this ad group is. Maybe I do that. But what I would do is I would start this whole process over and create another ad group focused on rule number one, the core topic. So I would need to do this whole thing again for stump grinding. Stump removal. Right. Those are the same things. That's a different ad group. Does not belong here. I do it, but not in this ad group. The next one is tree trimming service near me. Nope. Trimming out. Don't add it. I don't block it. I don't add it as a negative necessarily, but I just don't add it. Next one is stump removal near me. Right. Don't add it. Next one is tree pruning near me. Nope, not right. Next. Now we come to the next one. Best tree Service Near Me. This one I don't like for multiple reasons. Tree service Near Me. Very generic. Also, Best tree service Near Me. Such a heavily weighted research term. Right. I'm not necessarily interested in shoppers that are looking for the best or the biggest company. I just want people that are looking for me and my little small business that I have. This is something based on personal preference. But you can decide if people looking for best Tree service near me is right for your company. Most of the time for small businesses. I don't like searches like that. Next one is up to you as well. Affordable Tree service Near Me. No thanks. I don't want that. Maybe I'm probably. I'm my business. I'm priced competitively. But I'm certainly not the cheapest. I don't, I don't do the cheapest stuff. Maybe even more affordable than some. But not necessarily cheap. Right. So I don't even go after affordable. Right. Other things that I do, like these last three in my list. Tree debris removal Near Me. Great. I like that. Doesn't say limb, it doesn't say stump. Tree debris removal Near Me. Next one is really good licensed tree removal service Near Me. Well, that's, that's really cool. You know, that's someone who is looking for a legit company, not just a guy with a chainsaw. Right. I like it. And then the third and final one of this little list here is Tree Felling Near Me. Tree felling Near Me. Yeah, I like that. Tree cut. This is obviously someone who needs a full tree cut down. Yep, that's what I'm looking for. I want high quality services. So tree felling near me is something that I would target. Okay. So that's, that's an example of going through step number six. I ignore about half of them. I add a few of them, but only the ones that make sense. So then the last thing that I do is I keep an eye out. Step number seven, I keep an eye out for negative keywords. So what does that look like? Well, I've learned a couple things. I might actually add affordable as a negative keyword. I might add the word cheap as a negative keyword. I might add the word trimming as a ad group. Negative. Right. I don't want anything in this ad group having to do with the word trim or trimming. So I add those as negative keywords. Pruning I might add as an ad group. Negative. Right. This is tree removal. Tree debris removal. Tree felling. It's not pruning. So add pruning or Prune as a negative keyword. The word stump might be a negative ad group keyword and the word limb or lims might be an ad group negative. And that's it. Once that's done, I might have five or six, maybe 10 keywords that I've added. That is a healthy, strong keyword research process that can build you a campaign that will get you started on the right foot. If you follow that process, it should be a very simple, repeatable process. And as soon as you need to do something around stump or pruning or limb removal or storm, you know, storm removal kind of stuff, there's all kinds of ways you follow that same process for each of those different sub services that fall under your main business service. Okay, and that's it. That's honestly how I do keyword research. When I start new campaigns now, it gets heavier and heavier, there's more involved, but that is absolutely how I start my ad groups and get them started and moving into the optimization process. Okay, so we're going to move on to the latter part of the show. The latter part of the show is going to get into something that I've been thinking about recently, been mulling over imposter syndrome. We're going to define that. What is imposter syndrome? How does it affect how you might be hurting your campaign? And we're going to get into that. For the topic of the week before, I do want to remind you, optio.com PSP that is a special URL that you can go to for a 28 day free trial. This is an exclusive offer. If you go to optio.com PSP use this, the link in the description of this podcast and you can get a free trial. Use the chat box on their website to say, hey, I heard about this from Chris. Can I, can I get that free trial that he mentioned? They'll hook you up. If you don't do it that way, you'll only get 14 days, which tell you what, I like the extra two weeks they give you and you can get it exclusively@optio.com PSP Here we are. For those of you that are still with me, I want to talk about something that is chronic in the PPC world. Chronic in any professional industry. It is not exclusive to ppc, but it certainly is something very prevalent because in PPC world we have our workstation, right? You have your silo that you're working in and you're trying to get stuff done and you're working on an account and we all feel this sense of I don't know what to do, this isn't working, or oh my gosh. I look at the screen and I am baffled by what I see. I, I don't really know what to do. This, this sense of inadequacy, worry feeling, this is, this is called imposter syndrome and I care about this. And I'm talking about it because it leads to poor management decisions. Okay, here's the other side of it. I'm not talking about this because I want you to feel good about yourself. I'm not a self esteem guy. I don't care if you have positive self esteem. I don't care if you feel inadequate. I feel people should absolutely have a sense of worry and concern and nervousness about anything they're doing. I'm talking about this because I want you to be the best manager and to realize this imposter syndrome could be leading you to making even worse decisions in your Google Ads account. I'm going to give you five factors of imposter syndrome that are causing you to make even worse mistakes in your Google Ads account. Okay? So number one, self doubt. And just to clarify what this means, self doubt meaning persistent feelings of inadequacy despite the evidence of success. So how does this contribute to a super negative aspect of a manager? Well, this presents itself in the form of very messy accounts with no real strategy. It essentially comes in the form of cluttered accounts that are masquerading as strategic. This is someone who builds new campaigns constantly and doesn't want to turn this one off because it had one conversion. You're like, maybe, maybe it'll work. Always second guessing themselves, self doubt, doubting themselves. That, that wasn't a good idea. That was dumb. I'm going to do it better this time. And 15, 16 different campaigns later, you know, you just have a mess. And each campaign takes elements of the previous campaign and kind of packs it in and, and it becomes so overwhelming to look at it. So frustrating. There's so many things in your head that you don't really have a strategy anymore. It's just a mess. This whole self doubt thing is really absolutely destructive. Okay? And towards the end, I'm going to give you some specific tips on how to combat this. But I'm going to go through the negative aspects first. Next is fear of being exposed. Okay? That's the constant worry about being found out as a fraud. Now this one is particularly evil because this one is particularly demonstrated in people using conversions incorrectly or people using conversions deceptively. So if you feel this sense of imposter syndrome, you might be tempted to set up conversion actions for things that are not actually conversions. And I often wonder when I look at accounts that have inflated conversion metrics, did this person do this because they're worried about being fired? Right? They, they set up a ton of conversions to pump their numbers up, right? Their fear of being fired, their fear of being exposed and shown as a fraud leads them to make decisions in the account that gives the numbers nice little shine to it, right? The traffic is absolute crap, but they set up a time on site conversion action. So anyone who spends over 45 seconds is marked as a conversion. So their cost per conversion looks amazing, right? All the metrics in their report look amazing and it's because they have a fear of being exposed. I mean, this is a great armor to put around yourself to say, excuse me, I have a 15%, I have a 30% conversion rate. There isn't, there is nothing wrong with my account. This is phenomenal. Look up typical conversion rates. My conversion rate is astoundingly high. Yeah, this is imposter syndrome, alright? Number three is perfectionism. Setting unrealistically high standards and then feeling failure when they're not met. So this shows itself in the form of someone expecting the account to constantly improve. And this is more of me explaining to you, accounts don't always improve. Accounts have seasons, accounts go poorly for absolutely no reason at all. Accounts stop getting conversions all the time. I can tell you, after doing many, many, many consulting sessions with people who deal with the same problem, there have been many times where I, at the end of a full hour of doing a massive audit on the account, working through them, talking through everything. In the end, my advice is change this a little bit. Try this. But really there's nothing wrong here. And the only problem is, is they, that they think that it's uncommon for Google Ads campaigns to start failing. It happens all the time. So perfectionism, trying to strive for, you know, constant improvement and perfection, unrealistic standards. This leads you to think that if you don't have a increasing number on your KPIs that you're failing. That is not the case. So stop expecting and setting your standards at a point that can never be attained because they will lead you to decisions that will destroy the campaign because you expected it to do really well this month and if it doesn't, you're going to completely restructure. And then that leads us to number four, overworking. Feeling the need to improve worth through excessive effort. Right? So this is another aspect of imposter syndrome. So this comes in the form of micromanagement. Making changes too often, in particular too many changes with no clear reason for those changes, Filling out the change history just to show changes. I have plenty of accounts that do very well and are running just how I want them to run. And I don't have changes every day. I may not even have changes every week. And putting and doing more and changing this percentage and adjusting this and pausing this and setting this up and changing this ad copy, a lot of times that is not something that is needed. And that overworking aspect of imposter syndrome can kill a campaign. I cannot tell you how many times I jump into account and I am blown away by someone who micromanages and has 2% bid adjustment here, 5% bid adjustment here. You know, at the device level and once at the campaign level, I'm like, there's no possible way that this is helping you. This is complexity at a waist. All right, and last on, the five points of imposter syndrome is comparing to others feeling inferior by measuring success against your peers. And this is very common for people who don't even run a Google Ads account yet or just started. They immediately heard about some guy, they watched a YouTube video or they talked to their buddy, or, you know, a competitor who brags about his amazing ROAS numbers or his amazing cost per click or his amazing cost per conversion, and they think he's doing it. And I have the same service as him, the same business, the same product as him. Why am I not getting that? I'll tell you what. No campaign has an expectation of anything. There are conversion rates, there are cost per click numbers that do not make sense. And it is different for every client, every business, every industry. Nobody can expect to replicate what someone else is doing just because they tell you, yeah, I do this, this and this, and it works. Stop doing that. Comparing yourself to others will lead you to make poor decisions because it works for them, but do not expect it to work for you. And I have one bonus if you guys are still around. All right, hopefully, hopefully you're enjoying this. Let me know. Send me an email. Chris, you can send me an email at paid search podcastmail.com Let me know if you agree. Disagree. But I have one final bonus here, and this is actually a negative aspect of imposter syndrome, but I think it's a good thing. So of all the bad things about imposter syndrome, this is a good thing, and that's attributing success to luck. In other words, Believing achievements result from external factors rather than your skill or your effort. This, I think it's actually good. People should do this more often. You should not assume that when you made that little adjustment, it worked because this, this, this way of thinking forces you to wait for patterns before accepting success. If you have a really good week, don't assume it was something that you did unless you specifically had a hypothesis. You put that into action in a very limited capacity and you were able to see specific changes that you were looking for. Most of the time, people don't make changes to that kind of precision. So attributing success to luck, I think is a good thing. And people should practice that more often. Oh, hey, things weren't really good. Let's wait and see. Let's. Let's give it some time. Maybe we don't immediately try and restructure the entire account based on that one little arbitrary thing that happened to work that one time. All right, maybe that one month was really good. Maybe last year was really good. Assuming that it was one particular thing is a very ignorant thing to do in Google Ads because there is never one thing that determines success in Google Ads. There is million things. You're doing a lot of things in line the right way. So if anything, attributing your success to luck is probably a good thing and people should practice that more often. So there you go. There are five bad one good thing about imposter syndrome in Google Ads and how it can be hurting your account. So thank you guys for being a part of the show. Thought I'd give a couple little speeches today. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll be back next week. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can find my website, Chris, at, well, chrishaeffer. Com, you can find me there. Reach out to me. Otherwise, I'll catch you guys next week.