65% of users click on an ad when making a purchase. This makes PPC a highly beneficial marketing channel for businesses who are looking to drive targeted traffic to their website, boost sales, and increase brand awareness.
However, the success of a PPC campaign does rely heavily on using the right keywords to effectively reach your target audience, improve your ad’s performance, and maximise your ROAS. Otherwise, you'll waste budget by attracting clicks that don't convert.
Conducting keyword research for PPC advertising isn't that dissimilar to keyword research for organic search results, but here we’ll go through the specifics of PPC keyword research so you can create campaigns that exceed your desired results.
Before we dive into keyword research, first here’s a brief overview of what PPC actually is.
PPC (pay-per-click) is a form of advertising where an advertiser pays a fee to the publisher every time a user clicks on their ad. There are several varieties of PPC, including search ads, display ads, social media ads, shopping ads, and video ads.
80% of businesses rely on pay-per-click advertising to grow their business. This method of marketing is so widely used because PPC ads are highly targeted. Ads are served to users who are actively searching for related content and are likely to be further down the sales funnel and ready to make a purchase - making it worth the fee.
With keywords sitting at the forefront of a good PPC campaign, here’s how to carry out effective keyword research for your next PPC campaign.
Before getting into the nitty gritty of keyword research, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your ideal audience, including what their pain points are and what language resonates with them most.
By identifying your target audience, you will have the foundation needed to select the most relevant keywords for your campaign and attract clicks from the right users who have a high purchasing intent.
Once you‘ve established your target audience, you need to create a list of keywords that are broadly related to your product or service - these will form the base of your research. For example, if you are selling headphones then some of your seed keywords may include ‘wireless headphones’, ‘bluetooth headphones’ and ‘gaming headphones’.
You can use tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or Semrush to identify seed keywords for your business.
Once you have a list of broad keywords, you need to expand on it with additional variations of your target keywords and more specific long-tail keywords (keywords with more than three words). Tools like Google Keyword Planner are ideal for this.
Most keyword research tools will show you data such as search volume, competition, and cost per click (CPC). Keywords that have a high search volume, low competition, and relatively low CPC are the keywords you should aim to focus on.
Search intent - the intention behind the search - is an often overlooked but crucial element of choosing the right keywords for your PPC campaign. If you’re targeting the wrong search intent then you’re unlikely to see the ROI you were hoping for.
There are four main types of search intent:
PPC campaigns typically target keywords with commercial and transactional intent, as these are more likely to result in a conversion.
Some keyword tools will give you an indication of the search intent by labelling them. You can also get a good idea of search intent by evaluating the search results for your chosen keyword.
Negative keywords are keywords you want to exclude from your targeting to prevent your ad from being triggered by queries that are irrelevant to your campaign. It’s important to do this to avoid paying for clicks that won't provide results and to improve the quality of traffic to your site.
You can use negative broad match, negative phrase match, and negative exact match keyword to prevent your ads being activated by certain words.
Finding the most profitable keywords is essential for forming a solid PPC strategy that maximises your ROAS. By gaining a clear understanding of your audience, creating a list of seed keywords, expanding on your seed keywords, determining search intent, excluding certain keywords, and frequently adjusting your strategy based on ad performance, you can create a PPC campaign that delivers lasting results.
