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PPC keyword research: what keywords should you target for your campaigns?
Author : Andy Kehoe, Stone Junction
24 March 2022
Andy Kehoe
In an increasingly competitive business environment, PPC can go a long way towards fulfilling your marketing objectives, explains Andy Kehoe, Marketing Executive at digital marketing, PR and PPC agency, Stone Junction.
However, you must be able to create and manage your PPC campaigns efficiently to get the most bang for your buck. The best way to do this is by targeting the right keywords, which bring in the correct traffic when you set the campaign up.
For example, if I type in ‘industrial robots’ or ‘industrial robots for sale’ into Google, global robotics automation giant, Kuka, appears as a paid ad near the top. As a reputable market leader, I kind of knew that they would, because you would expect a company of that scale to be doing the right things when it comes to its marketing strategy, and PPC is definitely one of them.
The cost of targeting the right PPC keywords
Paid keyword research is a lot like standard keyword research but with a twist. With PPC, you must take into account the cost of showing up for the phrase.
While paid advertising is a chance to show up for the more popular search queries in your field, these will cost a lot more, per click, and are sometimes only affordable for massive companies with huge budgets.
It’s almost like an auction process, you’re competing against other companies for the top PPC spot on Google, and the more you pay, the higher up you show in the paid ads hierarchy. For example, Kuka shows up third amongst the paid ads with two other companies: Güdel and Vention above them, meaning that these two have likely bid higher to gain the top spots, or the quality of their ads are better.
Of course, the paid ad landscape will be different each time you check it – depending on the remaining budget of the advertisers, geography, search history, social contacts and, essentially, everything you do online!
It's important to find balance by identifying search terms that offer a good search volume with a modest cost per click. There are always hidden gems to be found in the keyword research process.
Blowing too much on PPC can severely affect your profit margins. There are brands littered across social media and Google, which create a false sense that they are doing well. In reality, their campaigns aren’t that profitable because of the vast amounts they are throwing at popular search terms.
The company I just mentioned, Vention, appears at the top of almost every search term regarding robotics. In fact, even when I type in ‘ABB Robotics’, they still show up first. As a result, it’s likely that Vention is spending a lot on PPC, and I immediately get the impression that they are a relatively new market player trying to gain traction. Upon looking at their website, they were founded in 2016.
But showing up for a specific competitors name, such as ABB Robotics, might not be wise. Anyone searching for that term has the intention of visiting that specific company’s website, which makes it a waste of your budget. Actually, this leads us nicely onto the next section…
Getting the right traffic
I was analysing a PPC campaign for a client recently. Something I immediately noticed was that they were pulling in paid traffic from informational queries.
This is like a Westminster grocery store owner paying someone to provide tourists with directions, in the hope that one of the sightseers eventually moves to London and starts doing their weekly shop in his store.
It is a big no, no. The goal of PPC is to attract traffic that’s going to convert into a sale.
This happened because the campaign’s keyword preferences were set to ‘broad match’ for generic industry search queries, so Google was plucking related informational keyword terms, triggering the ad so that it showed up for them.
Let’s say, Epson Robotics wanted to access an audience looking to buy robots and robot peripherals, and it wanted to show up for ‘SCARA robots’, but they have their keyword preferences set to ‘broad match’. The ads would probably show up for wasteful terms like ‘what is a robot?’ and ‘build my own robot’ as well. So, the person searching might click on the EPSON link at the top, and that would cost money, for traffic with no purchase intention.
Naturally, an alternative would be to optimise your own website so that you show up in organic search for the key phrase you are after. This is what Stone Junction client; TM Robotics has done and a quick search for ‘SCARA robots’ on Google will serve its site on page one.
The ideal scenario is to do both, dominating the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) with both paid and organic listings.
Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer
So, when picking keywords for your PPC campaigns, ensure that you are showing up for transactional queries, using smartly chosen key words that provide return on investment.
If you were a potential customer with the intent to buy something, what would you search? It’s easy to establish the search volume a particular phrase delivers, using any one of a number for free tools and browser extensions, but understanding the customer is a harder task.
If you really ran a Westminster grocery store, you would know exactly what the busy commuters want to pick up on their way to and from work — and which products make you the most money. You would advertise those things in your valuable window space and put them in your key point-of-sale locations. Pay per click isn’t that much different — it’s just a matter of good management.
Andy Kehoe is a Marketing Executive at Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He supports Everton, but don’t blame him for that.
If you email him and ask for an analysis of your Google ads spend, he will send you one – totally free. You can’t say fairer than that, can you? He might also ask for your opinion on Frank Lampard, but you can’t win them all.
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