Keyword Discovery Process

It’s important to have a process for reliably building out the keyword base for PPC campaigns. The keyword base strongly influences how well a campaign can ultimately perform. The keyword base is the foundation for search advertising campaigns.

  • We spider the competitor sites identified during our “PPC competitive research” process.  We also spider your site and landing pages to extract and filter keywords that go into a “keyword bucket” as shown in the diagram.
  • While locating direct competitors, we also familiarize ourselves with their products and/or services. We take note of competing advertiser positioning, messaging, offers, and trends.
  • We then expand the number of keywords discovered using proprietary software tools until we’ve developed a comprehensive keyword base.

At this point, we’ve most likely developed a keyword base too large for a pragmatic ad budget to serve, so the list is often pared. However, any wasteful or ineffective keywords will be parsed out of the campaign as we optimize it.

The optimization process leaves only those keywords that perform well, or “assisting” keywords that pull traffic into the top or middle of the conversion funnel.

Longer-tail keywords that convert well but might be missed with a less robust keyword discovery process.

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