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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
My Favorite Keyword Hack (Episode 433)
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Chris
Hello and welcome to the Faith Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I am going to share my Faith Favorite hack for keywords. I'm going to show you my favorite way to find keywords, how to read Google's mind about how it interprets my keywords, how to just do a gut check and make sure my ad group is properly aligned with how it should be. It's a really cool tool. It's right there in Google Ads. It is not something that you have to go anywhere for. You're using it now and you don't realize how cool this little tool actually is. So I'm going to talk about how to use it, what it is, and all of that. And before I do that, I want to answer a couple questions from listeners, I.e. listeners of the podcast who send in their questions to me. And you can also send in a question at paid search podcastmail.com paid search podcast. Send in your question and I'll put it in queue. And typically I reply and let you know that I'm answering it so you won't miss the episode. So my first question here is from Matt. Matt says first, thank you for hosting a podcast that consistently provides valuable content. I listen to a few different PPC SEO podcasts and yours is always my first listen because it doesn't fall into the trap of loading on vague and abstract filler content. Thank you, Matt. I work hard to make sure that this is a very efficient 30 to 40 minutes for you, so I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. Matt's question is about if there's a point when paid search doesn't have value because organic rank is so strong. He says we are in a unique situation where our competitors do not pursue search ads. This allows us to get visibility when we rank poorly for the most valuable keywords. Now, we rank first or second for many of these keywords. Surely many of the ad clickers would have gone to our organic result. So the question is there a point when search doesn't, you know, paid search ads does not make sense because the organic is doing so well. So the Google answer to this is, oh, absolutely, you should always run paid ads because paid ads will double the chance that your ad is going to show. You know, if someone sees their ad, it helps to build authority and it doubles the chances of someone seeing, you know, they see this paid ad and they see your other ad there. And of course, that is a company telling you that answer because they are apt to benefit from the fact that you're running ads and Paying for those ads. So, you know, that's the Google answer. And the fact is it's largely correct. Even though they and I benefit whenever people run ads because I potentially could have a client. The point is that when you run paid ads, beyond just the doubling effect, you can get traffic that you may not have otherwise gotten. That's true. But there's something I think, that makes even more sense than that. With paid ads, you can directly control how much your message focuses on this thing or that thing. You can pay for when your ads show. You can pay for all these different types of aspects that make sure that your ad copy looks a certain way. And that is not something that you can do organically. Sure, you could change your ad, your headlines, and your titles on your organic page, but that would be a slow process to see that turnaround. You know, it may even affect your ranking. So the important part about search ads that you would never get organically is that you can directly affect your messaging. If, for example, you have a price point change, you have a certain message, seasonal message that you would want to push into your ad copy, you can do that instantly. That can be done. That huge versatility of a paid ad is great. Additionally, you get direct information about where your competitors are showing, if they're showing, and if you don't have any competitors showing along with you, then you get information about your searches. How many searches are happening, what time of day are these searches, what type of ad copy drives the most interest, how are they searching? You know, you actually get real search term information. I would say if you're enjoying being at the top and people have not caught on to paid ads, and you're really there for no particular competitive reason. I think there is an analytical reason to be there. And you get a lot of data, you get a lot of information that you would otherwise never get with organic ads. And relatively it's, you know, it's, it's cheap. Theoretically, you shouldn't be paying top dollar if you have no competitors. But because of the click threshold rule that Google came up with a few years ago, that's no longer the case. You could still be paying quite a bit for these clicks simply because Google has a high click threshold requirement for those ads. So that theory is out the door. But you still get the benefit of high versatility, the ability to change your message, the ability to push people to a different page. Organically, you might rank for this page, but what if you want people to go to a different seasonal page, a different page that has a special message on it or a better converting page to test that. So a lot of versatility there. And finally, I'll say this, Matt, if you ever come down off of the mountain and suddenly realize, oh, there's competitors here, suddenly you're dealing with competitors. You're having to fight out for these first positions. Other people start to catch on. You already have an advantage because you have been optimizing and improving your paid ads over this time. Anyone that starts after you has a disadvantage. So it's nice, even at a small budget to have these campaigns running because you'll have a campaign ready to go, you'll already have the data, you'll already know what your CPCs are, the ideal keywords, ad copy, all of that. It's already going. So the last thing I'll say is just to draw a very defined line here. I am not talking about brand keywords. I'm not talking about keywords that are just your company name, your product name, you know, some kind of branding that is specific to you. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that that's worth it just to show ads because you'll be there. I'm specifically talking about non brand traffic. Traffic that's coming to you because they don't know who you are. They have no idea about your product or services. They're searching for a solution for a product, for a service that is not necessarily you, it's anyone. And you're getting that traffic because you have ads for those kind of keywords. So it's important to define that kind of difference. Non brand traffic, I think is worth it. Whether brand traffic is worth it or not. That's a whole nother discussion that I will leave for another day. So we have another question from Bernardo, but before I go to that, I want to tell you about optio. Optio.com PSP I recently had someone email me, say, hey Chris, you talk about this amazing offer all the time, this two month free trial that's offered exclusively through your podcast. And I don't know how to get it because they went to the URL optio.com PSP and it still said 30 days. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you are confused about that offer, you need to know that you can still get the offer. They're not advertising it, they're not sharing it everywhere. It's only available if you know that. You have to talk to the Optio team and tell them, Kris, the paid search podcast guy, the podcast special offer thing, just mention something about A podcast offer for two months, 60 days, that extended trial, then they'll hook you up. This software is amazing. Everyone I talk to says yeah, of course I use it. I tried it. You talked about it. I tried it. It's amazing. I kept it. You're gonna like it, I guarantee it. That's opt e o.com PSP alright, so now let's move on to the next question. Bernardo says, hi Chris, I'm reaching out with a question about Google Ads behavior. Is it true that Google might stop showing ads if it notices I'm searching for a term repeatedly without clicking on the ads. I've been searching for my branded keyword and it's not showing up in the search results unless I'm in incognito mode. If Google is prioritizing organic results for my brand, does that mean my competitors ads won't show up when I search for my branded keywords? Is there any way to reset things to stop this from happening? Well Bernardo, politely I say stop it. Get some help. Okay, I don't mean that I'm referencing the Michael Jordan meme here obviously, but what I mean is stop it. Stop searching your own keyword. Okay? Setting up a Google Ads campaign and then searching for your keyword is like throwing a bottle with a, with a message, a message in a bottle into the ocean and then taking a net and scooping into the ocean and saying, I, I don't see my bottle. Why didn't I see my bottle? You have absolutely no control where that bottle went. It is an infinitesimally small amount of water you have scooped up. Right? This is the ocean we're talking about and that's an, that's akin to what you're doing on Google. There is really no reason to be searching for your keywords when the best information that you can possibly get is right there in Google Ads. You say, well Kris, I don't know what to look at. Well that's what I'm here to help you with. Let me tell you if your ad is showing or not. I'm going to tell you the specific metrics that you need to look at. Okay? So number one, if you are advertising on a branded keyword, you should be doing it as an exact match. Okay? So everything I say from here, if you're not doing it as an exact match, then I can't help you. Okay? Branded keywords should be exact match. If that means you need to have five of them for the different versions of the brand, whatever. But don't. I'm not Talking about phrase and I'm absolutely not talking about broad, I'm talking about exact match keywords only for branded. Okay? So if you're running, if your company is ABC Solutions, it should be exact match ABC Solutions. And then if you need to exact match ABC solution just so you can sleep well at night, then fine, do that too. Solutions and solution. Great. All right, but it should only be your exact brand. Alright, so now you ideally would run this on manual cpc. I highly advise that every brand campaign run on manual CPC because your only goal on branded is to just show up. If you're measuring your cost per conversion on branded keywords, you're lying to yourself. It's ridiculous. You should not be measuring based on conversions because how many people see your name and call you or click on your ad after searching for your own name is not a win. You shouldn't measure success based on how much interaction you get on your own name, your own company name, your own product name. What you should be measuring is, is my ad showing up enough? Is it showing, Am I limited by budget bid? Am I showing up against second position? Right, this is what you need to know. Alright, so manual bids, alright, so exact match keywords, manual bids. Now that we got the technical stuff out of the way, here's what you need to look at. You need to have about an 85 to 95% search impression share, maybe 100%, but you should at least have a 85% search impression share. If you don't know what that is, you know, look that up. That, that's, that's the, the term that Google uses to tell you as the advertiser how many times your ad shows up versus how many times it was eligible to show up. Alright, so ideally you should show up about 85, 90, 95, 100% of the time for your own brand keyword. Right? So if you're not in that percentage, either you're not doing exact match keywords, you're not doing manual, or there's some other problem there. Okay? Because if you're doing exact match keywords, you're using manual and you have a decent budget, that should be covered. Okay, now last, you should then check your absolute top percentage. Your absolute top ranking percentage is going to tell you how often you are in first position. Now if you're in first position, 30% of the time, you're getting outbid, you're not showing up, someone else is there in that top position and you need to raise your bids if you see that you're in top position. 100% of the time, but your search impression share is only 50%, then you're probably running out of budget. Then you would need to raise budget. So I go through all of this because going and tippity tap on the keyboard on your phone to search your own name. That is the most non scientific, non formal way of getting these metrics. That is dipping your net into the ocean, expecting to find your hidden treasure. It's not going to happen. You need to look at those metrics, run your brand campaign in a very specific approach. Exact match, manual bids, make sure you have a budget. And if you're not hitting those KPIs, if you're not hitting that absolute top, absolute top position and you're not hitting search impression share in a very high percentage number, then it's either the bids or the budget. That's it. There's only two problems really that it could be, might be some other things. But yeah, we'll, we'll generalize it with those two things. So hopefully that saves you a few minutes of frustration every day of opening up the browser, making sure you're there, all of that. I mean, you should be using the metrics that Google gives you. Either you trust them or you don't. And if you don't trust them, then what are you doing on Google Ads? The numbers in Google Ads should either be trustworthy or you don't trust them. And then if you don't trust them, then you probably shouldn't be spending money on ads in the first place because you don't trust Google. So I hope that helps. I hope that saves you some time every day because I don't want you to worry about whether your ads are showing up and grinding through that. I don't think that's a good use of your time. All right, so now moving into the topic of the week. Topic of the week is, as I alluded to at the very top of the show, my favorite keyword, hack. So I call this a hack because I'm using a tool that is not intended to be used this way. Okay, so people say the word hack all the time as though it's, you know, money hack or, you know, this dating hack, or, you know, this job hack or. It's kind of silly. And I think what they imply by it is that you can do something that is not in, get the result that's not intended from doing this specific action. And that's exactly what I mean by this. You're not breaking anything, you're not breaking any rules, you're not doing anything that would get you banned. This is just using a tool to its full potential. Okay, so first, let me define exactly where this tool is so that you can follow along. All right, so I don't share my screen. It's a podcast, and it would be unsafe for those of you driving. I know many of you listen while driving to listen to my podcast and watch a video at the same time. So I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna contribute to more car wrecks. So please bookmark this, sit at your computer, follow along as you listen, because I'm gonna guide you on how to find this tool. And it's not complicated. Many of you will probably know exactly what I'm talking about. So the tool is inside of your campaign. So go into one of your campaigns so that you see your ad groups. Okay, so you should see if you have four AD groups, 20 AD groups, one AD group. You should see them on the screen. You should have your ad groups listed. All right, so click into one of those ad groups. So now as you've clicked into one of those ad groups, you should see your keywords. You should see all the clicks, impressions. You should see a list of all your keywords. So you should now be looking at a list of keywords that are inside of an ad group which are inside of a campaign. Now, on that screen there at the. Towards the middle, the left top, if you want to call it potentially, there is a blue button, it is a circle, and it has a plus, it has a cross right in the middle. Okay, when you click that, you just found the tool that I'm talking about, okay? And you say, chris, this is just where I put my keywords in. What are you talking about? This is just a giant blank space. There's nothing here. There's nothing here that you know that can be hacked. Well, I'll tell you what you're looking at is something that has been long standing in Google Ads. Many, many, many years ago, there was a section in Google Ads that was just like this. And it had a gorgeous treed system where you could expand the trees one by one and see all these different types of keywords organized by topical information. Those days are gone. It was absolutely wonderful to be able to immediately have Google give you a ton of ideas based on themes and topics. So that's gone. So what we're left with now, just to the right of the blank square box that's on the screen that's waiting for your additional keywords is the get keyword ideas section. So this get keyword ideas is a list of keywords that are organized by relevance, relevance, meaning relevance to something in your ad group. So there are other keywords that Google's looking at. It's looking at your ad copy, it's looking at your landing page, it's looking at your keywords, and it's saying this. Pre determine this list of keywords that you already have, that you've already chosen for this ad group. We've taken that and we've given you further keyword ideas based on keyword ideas that are relevant to what you already have. And that's where our hack begins. Now, you can use this tool however you want. I'm not talking about how to use it. I'm talking about the way to hack this tool. All right, Many people wonder, Chris, is the problem with my Google Ads because I have the wrong keywords? Do I have too many keywords? What other keywords should I consider? How do I know if, you know, Google's showing me for the right things because my keywords are wrong, or, you know, should this keyword go with this other keyword? All of these questions are asking the one mysterious thing that we don't know about Google, and that is how does the algorithm read our keywords? All right, so I'm going to give you some examples. And for this example, I'm going to use like, a business that is growing, that's becoming more popular, and a lot of big cities have it. It's like a closet organization, consultant, designer, someone who can come in, organize your home, your closet, your bathroom, your bedroom. Very popular. And I'm going to use that as an example first. Real quick, I have to tell you about optio.com PSP please go check them out. They support the podcast they have for a very long time. Great tool. Many of you use it. Thank you guys so much for using it, for giving it a chance. It's a big part of what? Well, it is the only part that pays for this podcast. If you don't know, I run a YouTube channel as well where you can watch the podcast. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but there are no ads on my YouTube videos. I don't run ads. I don't have ads on my website. I don't run ads on any. Anything else. This is it. This is the only way I make money from the podcast. And I would appreciate if you gave Optio a chance just to try it out. Opt e o.com PSP so what I'm doing right now is I'm looking at the get keyword ideas list that is presented to me from one of my clients ad groups. Now, this is an old ad group that has a whole bunch of keywords in it. And these keywords are all over the place. They are really quite a mess. You know, they're all over the place. They're showing all kinds of different things and you know about the general idea of organization and closets and systems and stuff like that. All right, so some of the keywords in this ad group are walk in closets and custom closet system and closet designer and closet organization. Those are the keywords in this ad group. So you can see it's kind of all over the place. And if you don't see that yet, you will. I'll explain why I say it's all over the place, why I consider this to be kind of, you know, a very sloppy ad group. So when I click get keyword ideas, I'm going to go run. I'm going to run down the list of the first 10 maybe keywords in this get keyword ideas list, then I'll explain it. So the 10 are California closets near me. Shoe storage closet, shoe storage cabinet, wardrobe design, custom wardrobe, wardrobe storage, walk in wardrobe, clothes storage, California closets cost, linen closet, bedroom wardrobe. And then I'm going to stop on this one. Closet Remodel near me. Now, I listed a lot of keywords. I'll give you a hint. It's the very last. It's the very last keyword I listed. Which of those that I said sound like they would be a good fit for someone who organizes and remodels closets as a service? The answer is the last closet remodel near me. Right. Linen closet. Do you think someone who searches linen closet is looking for a remodeling service, an organizer service? No, probably not. Someone who searches Walk In Wardrobe, sure, they might be having organization issues, but they have not yet decided that they are going to engage in a professional, expensive service to help them organize their wardrobe. They just, they probably want to buy something at the store nearby or on an online website or something. Walk In Wardrobe is a product search. Custom wardrobe that was in there. That's a little closer. But it is clear that probably some of the best one that I've listed was Closet Remodel Near Me. This is someone who needs to update their closet. They're not happy with their closet. They want some changes. So I say all of this to show you the reason that this list that I gave you has Nine bad keywords, and one good one is because the originating keywords that are in this keyword list are all over the place. So what are you trying to tell us, Kris? What are you trying to say? This is what I'm trying to say. If you're wondering if your keywords are too broad, if you're wondering if your keywords are all over the place, if you're wondering if your keywords are too generic or you're bad at picking keywords, use this tool and go down the list one by one and ask yourself, are these good keywords? Are 90% of these keywords that I definitely want to advertise for? Or is only 10% or 0% of these something I'd want to advertise for? If the answer is very few or none of these keywords are good keywords that Google's suggesting, then that's a red flag, that your keywords are generic, they're not organized, they're not themed, they're not specific. They're just kind of all over the place. Your negative keyword list is not extensive enough. The keywords that you've chosen are not themed tightly enough for Google to read that and automatically come up with a theme. That is how you hack your keywords. You tell this system, look at my keywords and read them back to me. Give me keywords that match the theme of keywords that I've chosen. And if it spits back junk at you, you need to go back to the drawing board. You have chosen keywords that are too broad. And if there's really important keywords in there, you need to pull them out and put them into a much more specific ad group that really dials in on that. Now, to really bring this home, I'm going to pull up another ad group, one that I built for this client that is much more specific, and I'm going to read you the suggested keywords for my ad group that I built. Okay? So the ad group that I built is specifically focused on makeovers. Someone who wants a makeover, someone who wants a redesign, a remodel, an organization service, makeover service. Right? So that's the theme of this ad group. And let me read. And you draw your own conclusion. Let me read these suggested keywords to you and you tell me, does Google know what I'm looking for? When I force the system to read my keywords back to me and give me suggestions that match by relevance, you'll see that Google is interpreting my keywords much better than the other campaign. So here we go, here's the list that Google suggests. California Closets Near Me. I guess that's a company I keep seeing that. California Closets. I don't know what that is. Closets by design near Me. Probably another competitor. But again, Service closet remodel near me. Closet installers near me. Closet design Near Me. Affordable custom closets Near Me. Best closet companies near me. Closet makers Near Me. Right. This list goes on and on and on. I am scrolling down here's built in closets Near Me. Closet system installers Near Me. These are people that are not looking to buy product. First of all, every single one of these has Near Me in it. So you know, these are service focused, local focused keywords. So you say, Chris, how did you get so much more precise, relevant suggestions from your ad group versus the other ad group? That, my friend, is because I built my ad groups according to principle number one of Google Ads. Principle number one is strategic relevance. You build your campaigns, you build your ad groups based on a theme, a topic, something that is strategically focused on a level of interest of a client, someone who is interested in a specific thing. So an example of that is someone who wants a makeover of their closet. Another one might be someone who wants to hire a designer of their closet. Another theme might be someone who wants to have a new closet system installed in their closet. Right. These are themes. These are the. It's the same service, it's just a different way describing this service. So that is what themes look like. Themes are based on different angles, different aspects of the same thing. The need, the desire for whatever this product, service provides. It's the other, it's the. All the ways that this product can serve people. You want a designer? Yeah, we do that. You want someone to install something? Oh yeah, we do that. You need a whole makeover. Oh, we do that. Right. And I build these ad groups around that theme. Then when I ask Google to give me suggestions, they give me clean, clear suggestions that any of these could fit any of these. It's like, oh yeah, I could use almost every one of these. Almost every one of these work really well because they all fit that makeover kind of thing. So the whole point here is if you find yourself struggling with getting Google continues to give you bad search terms, search terms that are not on topic, search terms that are kind of all over the place. Keywords that. Should I use this keyword? Should I not go back to principle number one. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, principle number one is a principle that I came up with at Google Ads. Episode 385 is where I first define my 10 principles of Google Ads. I go through them one by one. If you don't find all the episodes on YouTube, be sure and check Spotify or the actual audio podcast. Everything's on that YouTube. I missed a couple episodes, but go back and listen to that. Strategic relevance is where they all relate to the same tone theme. Call to action. Everything should match end to end. And when you build it that way and you try this hack, this keyword hack, you'll get great results. You'll get clean, relatable terms that could fit in the same ad group. If you don't build it that way, you will get a mess. You'll get a bunch of kind of crappy keywords that don't fit actually should be completely ignored. Possibly could be negative keywords. They're so bad. It's a good gut check. It's a good way to make sure you're on task and you're building your campaigns the right way and that you're getting the right feedback from Google. So thank you for being a part of the podcast subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you've listened this far, you are the person I'm talking to. If you listen to 30 something minutes of this and you're still listening, take a second, write a review on whatever platform you're listening on. I greatly appreciate it. Especially if you're on Apple. Apple podcasts is, you know, kind of where some of the standard of the most reviews are judged by. So please leave a review there. But no matter what, please review no matter where you're listening. I greatly appreciate it. If you'd like to reach out to me, the links to my website for my consulting services, my training services, my management services are all in the description and Optio is in there as well. Thank you so much. I will catch you guys next week.