When most website owners think about keyword research, they're thinking about finding the best keywords to use on their websites and in their search marketing campaigns. The benefits here are obvious for most somewhat-SEO-savvy website owners -- finding easier-to-rank-for keywords, and it can help shape the type of visitors who find their website. While keyword research plays a vital role in determining the best keywords and phrases to use on a website, and with its link-building strategies, keyword research plays an increasingly important role with PPC, or pay-per-click, marketing.
Before-the-fact keyword research
Before you can start running a PPC campaign, you need to compile a list of keywords that will be used during your campaign. Fortunately, most website owners understand that keyword research here is important, and even for those who don't, many PPC ad services integrate keyword research tools right into their ad-placement interfaces. So, even those who might be a bit ignorant in this area have the opportunity to catch on before spending their ad budget on limited knowledge, hope, and a bit of luck.
The reason that before-the-fact keyword research is so important is about one thing -- eliminating wasteful spending. As an example, let's say that you run a flower-delivery service, and you're thinking about targeting the keyphrase ‘flower delivery'. While you could do this, and you would likely send hundreds of visitors to your website daily, it would also cost you $1,000-$2,500 per day if you could grab one of the top positions for the phrase. The thing is, the term ‘flower delivery' is quite broad -- you will be paying for visits that have no chance in converting into sales. If you have the ad budget, it might be worth it to test conversions for long-tail keyphrases, but if you don't -- you'll want to narrow your keyword list down to longer-tail phrases, which target a buyer's mindset.
So, before-the-fact keyword research can help you narrow your keyword list so that you don't waste money on likely-to-be highly-untargeted visits.
During-the-campaign keyword research
While initial keyword research is very important to the effectiveness of your PPC marketing campaign, this importance is dwarfed by the weight that midstream keyword research carries.
By tracking, and analyzing, how your visitors respond to your website, you can gauge which keywords bring in buyers, which keywords bring in likely buyers, and which keywords are just a waste of your money. Once you've identified which keywords are working and those that are not -- you can tweak your pay-per-click campaign to remove the keywords that do not convert, potentially setup additional landing pages to further test keywords that show potential, and expand your keyword list in areas where your clicks are turning into customers.
So, while you are running your PPC campaign, keyword research can help you to remove keywords that are wasteful spending, it can help you to identify keywords that may result in buyers, and it can show you which keywords are consistently turning clicks into paying customers.
Keyword research isn't just important for your website's on-and-off-page optimization strategies -- it plays a very important role when you are running pay-per-click marketing campaigns. PPC can be expensive, but the biggest expense of all is wasting your advertising budget on keywords that simply do not convert into buyers.
