How to improve your keywords in Google AdWords.

PPC Reading Time: 2 minutes

With Google AdWords, selecting the right keywords for your campaign is vital to get your Ads seen in the right places by the right people. If your keywords aren’t optimised, you run the risk of your campaign being shown to the wrong audience, causing you to spend your budget unnecessarily.

In one of our recent blogs we explained the importance of your AdWords Quality Score and Relevance. With your Ad group keywords it is important to regularly monitor:

  • Keyword relevance
  • Performance
  • Negative Keywords
  • Advertising Goals

Improve Keyword Relevance

You’ll want to make sure that your keywords are relevant to your product or service. This way, customers are more likely to click your ad as they search for specific terms, which can help to improve your click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score.

Think about it: if you run a floor waxing business, then you probably don’t want your ad showing to people searching for hair waxing salons. Here are some ways in which you can improve your keywords’ relevance:

  • Try replacing a single-word keyword with terms or phrases. Use keywords of two to three words that potential customers are likely to use to describe your product or service. In some cases, this means that you’ll want to make keywords that are too general more specific.
    Broad keywordSpecific keyword
    waxingwood floor waxing
    floorsfloor waxing services
    cleaningfloor cleaning services
  • Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the ads in your ad groups. Let’s say that the ads in your ad group are about the services that you specifically provide for pine wood floor waxing. You might want the keywords in that ad group to include the term pine wood. You can try using keyword insertion to dynamically update your ad text to include one of your keywords that matches a customer’s search terms.
  • Group your keywords by themes based on your product or service. And make sure that your ads are about your keyword themes. This way, we can show more relevant ads to potential customers when they’re searching for a specific product or service. You can also look at your company’s website layout to get an idea of how to group your keywords.

Modify keyword match types

Once you’ve segmented your keyword performance data by search terms match type, you can identify which match types are working well for which keywords and searches and you can refine match types for all your keywords to better hone in on the right customers.

Example:

Let’s say that your keyword list includes the broad match keyword floor cleaning. When you apply the search terms match type segment, you’ll see performance data for search terms that are the broad, phrase and exact-matched versions of your keyword.

For example, a phrase-matched search term might be floor cleaning services. If you see that floor cleaning has the highest click-through rate (CTR) from people searching on the phrase-matched version of your keyword, floor cleaning services, then you could add floor cleaning as a phrase match keyword and apply different bids to the phrase and broad-matched versions of the keyword.