← 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
PPC Basics - How to Pick The Best Keywords (Episode 488)
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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'm going to give you instructions on how to pick the best keywords. This is part of my ongoing series about PPC basics. How can you get the basics right in Google Ads? How can you make sure you get some of the most basic things that will decide whether you are successful or a failure in Google Ads? And how can you make sure that they're done the right way? We're going to continue on. We're going to talk about how to pick the best keywords in today's episode. This show is brought to you by the wonderful people@optio.com so a big part of having a successful Google Ads campaign is making sure that you exclude the wrong traffic, the bad traffic, right? Not all traffic is the same. There is plenty of places in Google that you can get traffic from that is not going to succeed. I don't care who you are or what you're doing in Google Ads. Some things just won't work universally. They are bad. It's just not good traffic. So using a wonderful tool in Opteo, you can see what things you need to exclude. How much mobile app traffic are you getting? Do you need to exclude specific placements in your Google Ads campaign? Are you aware of how much partner site traffic you're getting? Have you decided whether you want to allow or disallow certain categories for where your ads are showing, like park domains and, you know, death and tragedy kind of sites? I mean, if you're not aware that this, these options even exist, you're possibly sending your traffic and getting your traffic in ways that could be detrimental to your performance. Optio does all of this, plus a ton more, and it's focused on Google Ads. It's wanting you to have the most profitable Google Ads campaign possible. Which is not the advice you get directly in Google. The advice from Google is spend more, put more money in, reach broader with your keywords. And Opteo is conservative saying, no, no, no, let's make sure that your money is spent well. Well, that's why I like it. That's why I do this podcast. That's my goal with everyone that I work with in Google Ads. And that's why you should try opto.com PSP go to opteo.com PSP that special, special URL is the only place that you can get the special trial offer of 28 days. Otherwise you'll only get it for 14 days. And, and this trial Offer is only available@optio.com PSP check it out today. All right, so let's jump in to today's episode about how to pick the best keywords. I'm gonna take you on a demonstration of what is the massive, expansive options for what there is in Google Ads and what you can choose. And you know, the fact that some keywords will provide very different results than other keywords, and in no way are these keywords the same. These keywords, even though they're subtly different, there is an aspect in every keyword you choose about how much volume you're going to get, how much you're going to spend on that keyword, and how likely that person is to ask, actually take action and purchase or call you when they land on your site. And whether they're even likely to click on your ad. They may not even be interested because you're advertising to someone who's way outside of the bounds of even considering buying or purchasing from someone that's offering this service or this product. So let's go through it, and I'm going to go step by step and explain a couple different aspects about what makes keywords unique and how you can choose the right one for your campaign. Okay, so let's start with this. In the wide spectrum of Google Ads, there are, of course, endless possibilities on keywords. So to start off simple, right away, there are keywords that will get traffic and keywords that will never get traffic. Okay? So obviously everyone listening is interested in keywords that get traffic. Okay. But I first must define when you're choosing keywords in Google Ads. You can't just make up keywords. You can't just say, you know what, I want to advertise for people looking for this, and I'm just gonna make up a keyword and I'm gonna run it and I'm gonna get traffic on that. Well, the fact is, is that Google will probably let you run that keyword, but whether you actually get traffic that reflects that keyword is the real question. Because for today's example, I have to use an industry. Otherwise, this is going to be really bizarre for me to talk about keywords without having some example industries. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use daycares, like child daycare facility. Let's say that we have a child daycare in the Dallas, Texas area. Okay. So for my examples, I'm going to use this local service as an example. And let's say that the company is interested in advertising specifically for People looking for afternoon daycare only, something like that, you know, that's what they specialize. Or maybe that's the slots they really need to fill. They have the morning stuff, but they need the afternoon filled. So they decide to launch a Google Ads campaign for afternoon, afternoon daycare in Dallas, Texas. They decide, they choose that keyword and they put that into Google and guess what? It doesn't get any traffic. Because even though they have a desire to sell afternoon slots for their daycare facility, people don't search that way. That is not how they can fulfill that need because no one is searching for that. So that's the number one thing when you're choosing keywords, you have to go where the people are searching. Okay? So there's a whole genre, a whole area of keywords that you're dreaming up that are useless. Okay? So put those dreams of getting this super niche, highly targeted, specific traffic aside. That is not realistic. You need to work with the scope of traffic. Millions and billions of searches are out there. You look to those to get you the traffic. Because it's the same people. The people you're dreaming up doing this ridiculous search that doesn't exist are the same people that are doing all these other searches. So you can find them. They're there. You just have to go where they're searching. Okay, so that's the first thing is pick keywords that have volume. Seems silly, right? But if you've never done this before, it's a common mistake. All right, so next, now we're looking at keywords that have volume. So we need to pick keywords that have the appropriate value to what we're trying to achieve. Alright? So to understand this, you have to understand that some keywords have high volume and little value and other keywords have low volume and high value. So there's a balance that you have to work with here. So here's, here's an example. Imagine you have an XY graph, right? And it's a slow descending line starting at a very high number at the top and slowly descending from left to right into a very thin small line over on the bottom right of the graph. So this representation, it's like a ski slope, right? It's starting at the top and going all the way down and flattening out to a flat line at the very bottom, right? This ski slope type of chart or graph is a good representation of high volume, low value and high value, low volume, right? So we need to make sure that we are putting our emphasis not just on the low volume High value. But also on the high value. Lower, lower. I think I said that wrong. High, low, high volume, low value. I don't want you to assume that the best keywords out there are just the keywords that have thousands and thousands of searches. That is absolutely wrong. The best keywords are not the searches that have just a few searches. The best keywords are the ones that are appropriate to what you're trying to attain. So, so let's talk about it. Let's talk about how can you pick from this wide spectrum this, this down sloping graph of keywords and all the possibilities. So let's use a daycare facility in Dallas to explain that. Okay, so at the top, at the top of this slope, let's talk about an example keyword that might be happening. There might be a search at the very top. High, high volume, low value. That's just doing a search for best daycare. Now you might say, well that's, that's great. I, I'm the best daycare. That's me. They're looking for me. Well, they're doing research, they're looking, they're educating themselves on what's available. Now if you don't believe me, do a search for best anything. And what are you going to see on Google? You're going to see videos, blogs, review sites, images, maybe some AI thing yelling at us about something or another. I mean, it's going to be filled with opinions and people saying I'm the best. And then the review site saying, well, we've looked at the top three bests and here are the top three best. It is saturated with opinions and data and it is not a conducive place to try and push your message because the person who's doing best daycare search is, has not yet moved to a point where they know what to do. They're looking for. They're just learning about what they think they might want and don't want. They don't know, they don't know what they're looking for. They're just trying to find some kind of solution. So they're searching, they're researching. They might be doing this on their phone, sitting at a red light. You don't know how much attention this person's really giving it. And based on their search, they're probably not ready to act at the moment. So this is an example of a keyword that's still relevant, but it's at the very tippity top of this slope. High volume, not so much value, not a lot of value here. Okay? So the good news is that you can still use this keyword. You just must understand that there's risk. If you use this keyword, there's risk. So maybe you decide to run this keyword or not. I'm going to tell you probably not. So let's move on. That's probably not a good place. It's your choice, but keep in mind you're going to get a lot of volume, a lot of just window shoppers, probably not a lot of people committing to calling or advancing into the next steps of getting a quote or something like that. All right, so let's move down the slope a bit and we get into average cost of daycare. This is someone who's price shopping. They don't know, can I even afford this? They go to a couple sites and they're seeing hundreds, thousands of dollars a month and they don't know, like I don't know if I can, you know, afford this. I mean, now they're starting to wonder about price and you know, they're going to start wondering about budget. They just need to know average cost of daycare. Again, research, a lot of price shopping is going to involve, you know, cost words in it. Price, the word, the word average, the word typical, you know, typical cost of things like that. So again, high volume of search, not great on value of traffic. High volume, moderate to low value here. Okay, so this could be a keyword that you could target. You could actually have a keyword that is, you know, average cost of daycare. And you could write ad copy to say, you know, we have the best prices in daycare. But you know, keep in mind, who wants to send their child to cheap daycare? I mean, you have to understand that putting your price in here is not going to necessarily attract the kind of traffic that would be likely to purchase from you. You know, cheap daycare buyers are probably very likely to hesitate on pulling the trigger of a multi thousand dollar kind of signup on daycare. So, you know, again, there's a lot of difficulty in qualifying this click. All right, so I'm gonna say again, probably avoid it. You probably don't want these high volume, high to mid volume at this point with low value. Okay, let's move down. There's a sweet spot in Google Ads. Now, I'm not. You don't necessarily know where it is. That's the adventure is to try and find it. But there is a sweet spot where that slope starts to level out. And now you're getting people that are searching, that are qualified, and there's enough of it that you can get a decent volume. Okay, that's where this slope starts to level out a little bit, right? When the slope is, you know, if it was a skiing slope, it'd be the bunny hill. You know, it's just kind of sloping real easy. There's a bunch of kids falling on their sides and parents dragging them up and trying not to yell. You know, I mean, that's, that's what this part is. It's the bunny slope of your Google Ads search volume that you're going after. And in this case, it's just the words daycare, right? Just the word daycare. It doesn't say daycare near me. It doesn't say daycare plus plus a G graph. It just the word daycare with a space, without a space, who cares? You know who types it. It's just the word daycare by itself. There's actually a bit of a spike right here. The volume of searches there kind of spikes up a bit because there's, there's a lot of that. People just type it. And often the reason for this is because the space between an educated searcher and a just online researcher is usually filled in by these very short searches. They're like, just type in the word daycare. It's often a good place to start and there's usually a little bit higher volume of this. So here's where we start to wonder, well, maybe this is where I should be. And my suggestion in choosing the best keywords for your campaign is for something like this, I think this is a good place to start. And more specifically, I think you should consider doing exact match of just the word daycare. Right? So daycare by itself is not high, high volume, but it's not super low volume. It's kind of right there in the middle. So you can even the risk out just a bit by making it exact match. In Google Ads, there are three different match types. Broad phrase and exact. When you choose exact match, you're telling Google, okay, I'm willing to advertise for daycare, but I don't want hardly any deviations from just that word by itself. If you step it back to phrase match, you're allowing Google to be a little more broad, a little more lenient with your matching of the people searches to your keyword. And if you use broad match, you're really just flinging both doors wide open and just allowing a lot of different types of traffic to come in. So we limit the risk of just the word daycare and put it in exact match, those are at least people that are looking up the word daycare. They may or may not be qualified. We may not want to put a whole lot of money into that, but it's a decent volume and we may want to test it. So moving on now into what's really going to drive value from here forward, when that line flattens out, here's where you get your real value. We get away from volume. We are no longer talking about thousands, tens of thousands of searches. We're talking about typically hundreds. You know, whether it's hundreds a week or hundreds a day, that depends on your industry and location, but doesn't matter. It's still a flattening out of the volume of traffic compared to all the other types of searches that we've, we've talked about. Okay, so an example would be someone who does daycares in Dallas. There we go. At least they've defined some type of geographic interest. Okay. They now have at least designated. I'm interested in Dallas now. If you've ever been to Dallas, it's a big area that doesn't really mean much. If you say Dallas, you're talking about quite a few hundreds of square miles here that it could possibly be, quote unquote, Dallas. So this is on the weak spectrum of value, but it's definitely more valuable than average cost of daycare or best daycares. Daycares in Dallas is better. So something like that I would probably suggest as a phrase match keyword. Right. A little bit lower volume, but the quality is better. Okay, so let's move down a little bit lower. And now the search is daycares in Plano, Texas. So that's, that's a sub. A smaller city within the Dallas area. I wouldn't really call it a neighborhood. It's much bigger than that now, but it's at least a smaller. If you're talking about Plano, you're talking about north Dallas by quite a few miles. So at least we've narrowed our scope. And for this daycare example, geographic. The nearness of these geographic searches I think are going to add more value. So now we've identified, okay, geographically, Plano's closer, so that's probably worth more now. I'm quite happy with that. I would suggest running again phrase match on a keyword like that. We don't want to go broad. Broad is going to be, it's not going to adhere to the word plain. Oh, enough. Right. That's a little too generous to Google broad match on any keywords. I think Instead of phrase match daycares in Plano. Plano Daycare, I mean there's different iterations you could try, but phrase match would be ideal now there's still more, there's still more we can get. There's still some even better qualified traffic. And this is, this is when you figure these out. After testing and trying and coming up with different ideas, this is where you're really successful in Google Ads. So I'm going to tell you about it right after I tell you again. Please take a look@optio.com who is my sponsor to keep this podcast going. That's O-P-T-E O.com PSP. It can help you find these kind of keywords. It can help you to dig and discover things about your Google Ads account that you didn't know otherwise. Alright, so the words that we're talking about from here have higher volume and even lower. Nope, said it wrong again. Higher value and even lower volume. Example, someone does a search for Catholic daycare, right? They are putting a specific religious value on their daycare. I mean, even more might be something like Plano Catholic Daycares. Now that's a big leap. And you may not get any traffic that actually falls when you start combining these, when you start combining these preferences into one search, you probably have now completely cut off your connection with reality on search volume. So I don't suggest combining, say, well, Chris, if Plano Daycare is good and Catholic Daycare is good, I'm going to say Plano Catholic Daycare and then that's even better. No, you have moved yourself because you've moved yourself out of the volume reach of Google Ads keywords. Again, you can't just make them up. Okay? And I have no idea if people actually search for something like that, but maybe, maybe they do, maybe they don't, but you can discover that you can, you can run these keywords and I would say, I would say phrase match again, phrase match I think is ideal. Catholic daycare is probably a good angle to go after. That is a separate value interest that someone might be interested in. And of course, if you're not a Catholic daycare, I wouldn't suggest doing that. You're not going to have people calling you because they're just going to drop on the site and their interest has no connection to what you're actually providing. So obviously you want to pick connections that your business provides as a benefit or feature of that business. So in my pretend business that I'm coming up with, it is a Catholic Daycare in Plano, Texas. So that's why I'm going with these examples and then moving down to the very end. Something like infant daycare. Right? Pre K daycare. Right. These are, these are preferences that are specific and maybe they match exactly with the kind of clientele that you want. So the person's looking for pre K. That's what you provide as pre K, whether it's, you know, religious or not or whatever. You pick the kind of step towards the value that you want to provide and you find people that are looking for that value. Catholic infant. It's in, it's in Plano. Try each of these different hooks and see which one provide good traffic for you. Now I would say everything that I've described, you know, past where it all starts to flatten out, I think phrase match is probably the best way to go. I do not suggest using exact match because as the search is really narrow at the end, you essentially put your traffic so specific that you just won't get any. Okay. And I don't suggest using broad for these lower volume keywords because the integrity of the word itself will be lost. When Google matches Catholic daycare as a broad match keyword, it will match things that are largely unrelated, honestly. I mean, you could just get searches for daycare near me, even though the keyword was Catholic daycare. You could just get clicks from people that are searching for Daycare near me has nothing to do with any, any religious or Catholic affiliation. That's what Broad Match does, is it is extremely broad and liberal in its matching of your term. So if you, the term itself is important to keep the integrity and the intent of the term itself, then really I think it's going to be important that you use phrase match. So that's, that is how you pick the right keywords. Okay? That's how you pick the best keywords. But let's talk about one other bonus thing that I have here because the fact is, is that sometimes it's hard to know what these value angles might be. You may not know. You might have listened to this whole thing and said, well, Chris, that's cool if I owned a daycare, but I do IT management, you know, and people don't really search for Catholic IT management or Infant IT management. Right, of course they don't. But I'm saying I don't have those value added keywords because people mainly search for just IT management or managed IT services or something. I'm familiar with the industry, I've worked in the industry a lot and sometimes traffic Just doesn't exist. So as this last point comes in, let me talk to those of you that struggle with even finding this narrow end. You say, well, my, my ski slope is all at the top of the mountain and then it's just a drop off. Like there is no flat, there is no bunny hill. In my search campaigns, I can't find them. Well, let's talk about that. For those of you that struggle with volume, I'm going to suggest playing on the steep side of the slope. Right. Best daycares and average cost of daycare. What you're going to have to do in instances like this is you're going to use exclusively broad match. You're going to have to allow Google to really reach and allow a lot of different types of traffic. And what you want to do is try and be more specific with this kind of traffic. You want to pick keywords that are a little more narrow in what they're doing, but still use broad match. So for example, you might try something that is top quality daycare near me. Right? That's a, it's kind of a weird phrase, but I'm just kind of going off the top of my head here. You want to try and give Google keywords that invoke a certain idea or certain value of some kind and then put it in broad match. This is where you can just make up a keyword and Google will look at the kind of meaning and the integrity of that keyword and try and match it to words that kind of match that same thing. That's what broad matches for. So if you find yourself unable to really find that narrow line of low volume, high value, you're going to have to play on the steep side of the mountain. You're going to have to play with terms that are wide in scope, but broad match keywords and use some of your funds to just try terms. Look at the search terms that are coming back from that. Try and dig and find. Oh, they're, oh, they're searching for this, you know, for daycare. I didn't realize it, but you know, they're doing stuff like weekend only daycare. You know, you might come across things that you never would have thought of. That is the ongoing optimization of Google Ads. If there's any true definition of what optimization looks like in Google Ads, it is the process of fishing for traffic, looking for traffic, finding something that is unrepresented in your current keywords, pulling that out and building an idea around that, building an ad group with some keywords around that that's what optimization looks like and you will have to play on the steep side of the keyword slope, fish for those terms and hopefully find some winners that are buried in your search terms there. Alright, so that is it. I hope that helps you. I hope that demystifies how keywords work and how you can choose the best keywords for your Google Ads campaign. If you'd like more help choosing keywords, writing ad copy, building campaigns, I'm available. ChrisHaefer.com is my website. You can book me for coaching or I can help manage your Google Ads campaign and just take it off your hands. I do that with a lot of accounts and I'd be happy to help with yours. Reach out to me Chris Schaefer.com Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.