Keyword Research

Introduction

Keyword & Industry research and the use of targeted keywords can almost be deemed as the most important aspect of any Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Internet Marketing campaign. If your keywords are not targeted and are not attracting the right type of traffic, you will not make sales. Additionally, if the keywords are targeted, but the industry is so competitive that you cannot get decent ad position for under $1.50, and then this is a problem as well. This tutorial is going to cover how to research keywords for an existing campaign, and how to find keywords that will open your eyes to new industries and opportunities.

When we create our keyword lists, we include both highly relevant keywords and keywords that are more broad in nature. By using the more broad keywords with the techniques you will learn in this tutorial you will be able to create highly relevant keywords, and find niche keywords that other advertisers are not aware of.

General Keywords

One of the biggest, and most common, mistakes that someone makes when new to PPC Advertising is bidding too high under very general, low converting keywords. These are keywords such as money, cars, music, and jewelry. General keywords are keywords that are very ambiguous and often times when people search using these keywords, they do not know what they are looking for. More importantly, they are most likely not willing to make a purchase. For example, the keyword “money” could pertain to currency, stocks, real estate, making money, debt, etc. If you are selling an ebook on how to “make money” as an Affiliate Marketer, you could attract a variety of people to your website. Perhaps someone would be looking for information on how to make money by selling on ebay, or how to make money by buying stocks, even how to make money by doing surveys. If you are selling an Internet Marketing Ebook, chances are that you are not going to be able to persuade someone trying to make money buying stocks, to buy your top rated product!

Rule of Thumb: If you cannot target a website specifically to a keyword, then chances are the keyword does not convert very high. Although you can have a great landing page and do a fantastic job pre-selling, how are you going to effectively promote anything under the keyword “money”. If your website focuses on selling Internet Marketing Ebooks, all of your keywords should be highly relevant to this.

What Are the Benefits of Your Products?

If you are selling an Internet Marketing eBook, put yourself in the midset that you are a buyer. What kind of information are you looking for? People who want to buy an Internet Marketing Ebook may be interested in:

• Learning about Internet Marketing
• Learning how to make money working online (at home, on the net, on the internet)
• Selling Products Online
• Learning How Internet Marketing Works
• Increasing Online Sales
• Taking their Business Online
• Driving new Customers to a Busness (online or offline)

When starting a new campaign, it is very important to make a list of “Benefits” that people may be looking for. You can then base your keyword research around these benefits

Choosing The "Right" Keywords

Where should you start when looking for keywords? There is a technique that you can follow when researching keywords within any industry. Ask yourself “If someone was looking to purchase this product/service, what are all the possible keywords and keyword phrase that they could type in?” For example, if someone was looking to purchase Beating Adwords, they could type in the product name “beating adwords” or the relating terms “beatingadwords” or “beatadwords”. If they were looking for make books to teach them how to make money online, they may search for “make money online”, “make money ebook”, “how to make money online”, or “make money on the internet”. They may search for “make money”, but if they want to make a purchase, they will most likely type in something more specific.

There are hundreds of people selling various products under the keyword “make money”, but the fact is that these websites are probably not making much profit, if any at all. If the searcher has no idea about Internet Marketing and wanted to learn more, they might search for “make money”. The search results would provide many ads. Some would say “Learn How to Make Money Online”, or “Make Money on the Internet”. In that case, the searcher would probably do another search for “Make money on the interent” – a more specific search. This is when you want your ads to be displayed, not under the general terms.

People are typically looking for a solution to a problem. This can apply to literally every single industry. How can you take advantage of this? Simple, fulfill their request (their search), and provide them with a solution to their problem.

Here are some keywords that you can append to your keywords to create highly targeted keywords phrases:

cure
resolve
solution
solutions
treatment
relief
resolution
alleviate
relieve
remove
rid
get rid of
detect
detection
repair
fix
delete
symptoms

review
compare
scam
comparison
reviews

instructions
info
information
book
guide
ebook
manual
directions

tips
tip
technique
techniques
secret
secrets

better
stronger
faster
quicker
bigger
smaller

If you were selling an Internet Marketing ebook, you could take general keyword like: Internet Marketing, and create keywords like this.

Internet marketing instructions
Internet marketing info
Internet marketing information
Internet marketing book
Internet marketing guide
Internet marketing ebook
Internet marketing manual
Internet marketing directions

These are highly relevant to what you are selling, and could easily be among the top converting keywords for your internet marketing ebook review site

Customer Demand

What are some products that are in demand? While you could use tools such as Word Tracker and get their free reports of the top 300 searches of the last month, but chances are you will look at the list and not find it beneficial unless you are promoting adult entertainment. You can find what people are looking to buy right now buy using our Keyword Research tool (located in the Research Center) and typing keywords in such as “buy”, “purchase”, “new”, “shop for”, and “order”. These will give you search results of people that are serious consumers and want to get to the point.

Here are some search results that we got from typing in these search terms "Buy", and "Purchase", into the Tool.

auto purchase
best buy
buy
buy a car
buy and sell
buy baby gift
buy book online
buy dvd jessica simpson
buy guitar
buy hydrocodone
buy music
buy new car
buy phentermine
buy stock
buy tramadol
buy used car
buy valium
buy viagra
buy vicodin
buy wholesale
california mortgage purchase
direct buy
home purchase
louisiana purchase
lousiana purchase
new car purchase
point of purchase display
pre purchase inspection
purchase
purchase dinar
purchase domain name
purchase fioricet
purchase house
purchase order
purchase phentermine
purchase proactiv
purchase property
purchase soma
purchase tramadol
purchase viagra

Searches such as “find”, “news”, and “info” are typically performed by people looking for more information on a product. You could use this to your advantage in same way by searching for keyword phrases that include these terms followed by a product or industry

Using Alexa.com

Have you ever found yourself looking at a site and wondering if it is a “hot” new product, or whether it has been around for a while? It is also nice to know if you can take advantage of promoting the product keywords. For example, when browsing the Internet, you come across a site called Wealthy Affiliate. You can typically base a sites quality on how much traffic they receive, depending on how long they have a been around.

http://www.alexa.com

You can determine website’s traffic using www.alexa.com. You simply type in the URL of the website you are trying to find out information about and it will give you traffic statistics on the website. From this data you can determine whether or not a website receives traffic. If you are promoting a product (or thinking about promoting it), and the web page has an Alexa of over 1,000,000 we suggest that you avoid promoting their affiliate program unless the product is BRAND NEW. Chances are this site receives low traffic for a reason.

If a site has a good alexa (under 100,000), chances are there is opportunity to promote the product keywords and receive decent traffic. For example, WealthyAffiliate.com has an Alexa ranking of 12,248 over the last 3 months. This means that WealthyAffiliate.com is 12,248 most popular on the entire Internet. You can safely assume that this site receives traffic through search engines, and some of the time the visitor comes to the site by searching product related keywords. These would be search terms such as:

wealthy affiliate
wealthyaffiliate
wealthy affiliate review
wealthy affiliate member
wealthy affiliate membership
compare wealthy affiliate
does wealthy affiliate work
buy wealthy affiliate
order wealthy affiliate

If you use the overture tool, you will see that the search term “wealthy affiliate” received over 300 searches last month, which means that it gets decent traffic. You can now take advantage by promoting these search terms promoting Wealthy Affiliate as they are not only high traffic and highly relevant, they will convert like crazy.

Merchant website that receive a lot of traffic are popular, and are often gold mines for Affiliates

Finding Keywords Before an Industry/Product

By using keyword tools like inventory.overture.com and the Google Keyword Tool, you will often find the keywords for an industry before you find out whether or not the industry is profitable. This means that you may come across several keyword niches while researching another product. Make sure you take note of these keywords right away. Write them down or you will forget about them. For instance, if you were researching “Wealthy Affiliate”, you may come across a keyword like “Beating Adwords”. Write these kinds of keywords down so that you can come back to them later. Many times, when doing keyword research, you will find many keywords that you would have never thought of.

Once you have a group of keywords for an industry, you need to determine whether the industry is profitable or not. Here are the logical steps that you should take in determining if the industry is profitable or not:

1. Search for Affiliate Programs – If there are not affiliate programs, there is probably no way to make the industry profitable. Type “industry name + affiliate” or “industry name + affiliate program” into Google and you will get the results of related affiliate programs. For instance, you could type in “beating adwords affiliate program”. The top listing will be a link to the Beating Adwords affiliate program information page.
   
   
2. Determine your break-even point and maximum Cost-Per-Click that you can spend on traffic. If you can obtain a hundred clicks for the price of a sale, you can obtain 100% ROI by converting at 1:50 (2% Conversion Ratio). This sort of campaign will typically be profitable. For Instance, if a product pays $45 per sale, and you need to convert at 1:50 to obtain 100% ROI, you cannot spend over $0.45 per click on average to achieve 100% ROI. If the product converts at a higher rate, you can raise your Cost-Per-Click accordingly. Finding the break-even point and maximum CPC will help you determine if you can afford to promote the industry using the keywords you have chosen.
   
   
3. Can you cross-sell products – This may open up doors to a whole new opportunity. If you can collect data (email & name) in the form of an opt-in list, can you promote related products to this person in the future? There are certain industries in which this is not an option, but for the most part there will be opportunity to generate an profitable mailing list.

If you do a lot of research, you will find often times find keywords before the industry. You then have an epiphany, “I wonder if I can make money within this industry, because I can sure get some good keywords cheap”. If you do a full analysis using the steps above you will be able to forecast whether a campaign will be profitable, however you will never be 100% sure until you actually implement it.

Conclusion

Keyword Research is one of the most valuable components involved in becoming a successful Internet Marketer, and although it is very difficult to teach someone how to think, we believe that these keyword research ideas will open new advertising campaigns for most of you. Remember that creative thinking is important to being a successful marketer and it begins with keyword research.

The techniques we've provided you in this tutorial are the same techniques that we use when branching into new markets. Much of our keyword research is done using our keyword research tool, google keyword tool, and our Google Match Types tool to combine keywords and make phrases.