Organising keywords, as far as PPC (pay per click advertising) is concerned, can be broken down into three parts.

1. Compile a list of relevant keywords 2. Use them correctly in your Google ads 3. Manage your campaign with the right adwords software

By the time we get to part three we will need software to manage our PPC campaign and there is nothing finer than the wonderful Ad Grenade.

For now we will focus on how to find a suitable list of keyword phrases to use in your ppc campaign – at zero cost !

There are some first class keyword research tools out there and the good news is that two of the best are free, namely Traffic Travis and Google’s own, excellent, ‘Keyword Tool External’.

If you are not very experienced in internet marketing and/or money is tight, I would recommend sticking with the free tools to begin with.

How To Compile A Large list Of Relevant Keywords – FREE

To begin with, compile a list of obvious phrases from your niche, for example ‘grow roses’, ‘how to grow roses’, ‘how to grow climbing roses’, ‘how to grow hardy roses’ etc. Another free tip, enter your phrases into the Google search box and see if the dropdown menu comes up with more gems.

Now put the whole lot through the ‘keyword finder’ in Traffic Travis and send everything T.T. has found to the ’sorter’, where you will cut out duplications, phrases shorter then two words or longer than ten and any phrase that includes ‘free’. You are looking for buyers not those just after freebies. Download your this list to your Notepad or some other kind of *.txt file where you will eliminate all inappropriate phrases.

At this point we load the entire list into Google’s ‘Keyword Tool External’ and click the ‘Get Keyword Ideas button, then add any extra keywords, that Google has suggested, to the list. When you download your list to a text file you will discover that it is arranged alphabetically.

Your final task is to arrange your list into very targeted groups of keywords, that is phrases that are very tightly related. I cannot over emphasize how important this is, your pay per click ads must take your customers to pages that not only use the keywords in those ad groups but must focus completely on the subject they suggest.

If you are in any way unsure about the ‘mechanics’ of working with these tools, I think you will find that after a little trial and error that the Google product is quite simple and the Traffic Travis people have provided very helpful videos.

In other articles I will describe how I use keywords within a campaign and how to manage the campaign itself. When you get to stage three it will become all too clear why, without some kind of adwords software, this whole system would be impossible to manage.

John Rivers

Tags: Pay Per Click

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