Welcome to part four of our introduction to PPC. If you haven’t already, you might like to read part one, part two and part three… wow, we’re creating a monster here

In the last post I looked at account structure, and today I’ll be looking at keyword research.

For the purposes of this illustration I’ll keep things fairly simple. Let’s go back to our example account Assured Insurance. They just want to focus on Taxi Insurance for the time being. So, how might we go about researching potential keywords for this niche?

Keyword Research

Well there are lots of keyword research tools out there – some are completely free, and others you have to pay for. I’m a huge fan of the Adwords Keyword Tool and, you’ll be pleased to know it’s free.

So, Assured Insurance want to sell taxi insurance. So, we need to think about what people who are looking for taxi insurance might type into a search engine.

The most obvious is of course – taxi insurance. Nice. But what else do people call taxis? Some people say cab, some say mini cab, some say black cab (and so on). So before I do anything else, I’d pop ‘taxi’ into the keyword tool.

This generates 137  related keywords, and a further 63 additional keywords. At the bottom of the first list there’s a blue link saying ‘add all 137′ – click it! Likewise click the link at the end of the second list to add all 63. On the right hand side of your screen you’ll see all of your selected keywords. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click download .csv for excel.

So you’ve now got a whole load of keywords – some better than others. Now’s the time to go through them and sort the wheat from the chaff.

First of all – think local. For example in London we have black cabs, in New York they have yellow cabs. Pick the term relevant to the location that you are targeting. Whilst you’re going through this list it’s also a really good idea to pull out the terms which are unrelated to your product or service.

So, I’ve been through my list, and here’s what I’ve got:

Related terms to taxi:

black cab, black cab taxi, black cabs, blacks taxis, cab, cab driver, cabs, mini cab, mini cabs, minicab, minicabs, private hire, private hire taxi, private hire taxis, taxi, taxi black cab, taxi black cabs, taxi cab, taxi driver, taxi drivers, taxicab, taxis.

Unrelated terms to taxi:

airport, bus, car, cars, chauffeur, fare, fares, limo, limousine, limousines, minibus, river, shuttle, transport, travel, used

NB these unrelated terms are going to be useful later on – so I’ll be keeping them safe.

So I’ve now got a list of the terms people might use when referring to taxis. Now of course you need to relate that back to insurance. So go back to the keyword tool and get keyword ideas for the search term ‘taxi insurance’.

I’ve now got 112 related keywords and 86 related keywords to taxi insurance. This time I’m looking at terms related to insurance that I can slot the terms which I’ve already got into. As before download all the keywords into .csv for excel and again sort the wheat from the chaff.

From this you can create yourself a pretty comprehensive list – e.g. for taxi:

taxi insurance, insurance for taxi, taxi insurance online quote, taxi insurance quote, best taxi insurance, budget taxi insurance, taxi insurance companies, taxi insurance quotes, cheap taxi insurance, cheaper taxi insurance, cheapest taxi insurance, compare taxi insurance, taxi insurance cover, taxi insurance brokers, etc, etc.

I’d then repeat this process for each of the related terms to taxi.

Other Keyword Research Methods

Now, the process above should give you a pretty comprehensive list – however there are still some other options open to you. If you’ve got an analytics package on your website you could use this to see which terms people are already using to find you.

You could also use a thesaurus – for this example, in addition to my existing options it also offered up hackney cab, and hackney carriage – possibly not the highest traffic terms, but nevertheless they might be worth including.

For some niches it’s also worth researching offline – e.g. reading around the subject, speaking to people in the market you are targeting etc.

That’s all (for now) folks! Don’t miss the next part of our series – we’ll be dealing with organising your keywords into adgroups (and explaining why it’s so important).

Image credit Jeffrey Beall

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Adwords, PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.