How PPC Keyword Strategies Can Boost Your Marketing ROI

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketers realize that creating good PPC keyword strategies can help target customers search and find you through the words they commonly speak or use.

Your keywords must stand out as they help you reach your target audience and pave the way for prospective customers. They help you identify relevant words or phrases related to the subject of your site. As a result, your website will perform better in search engines.

Keyword research helps you focus on those search terms that deliver results. It saves you from wasting time, efforts, and money on keywords that won’t generate any traffic.

Robust PPC keyword strategies play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO). However, that’s not the only reason these strategies are important. In this blog post, you’ll learn how PPC keyword strategies can help you solve your marketing woes.

What is a Keyword Strategy?

A keyword strategy is a detailed marketing plan of action that summarizes which user search queries you will target, and how. It includes every decision you make, depending on the findings of your keyword research. It could be about the content you intend to write or how you are going to track the results in Google Analytics.

A keyword strategy helps you determine how you target specific keywords to connect with your potential customers. You must have sufficient insights if you’re going to make well-informed decisions about your keyword strategy.

6 Steps to Create A Good Keyword Strategy

Here’s how you can craft a good keyword strategy:

1. Analyze Your Goals

The first step is to analyze yourself and your business. Think about your main objective and business goals. Identify what makes you unique. Consider the message that you wish to convey to your target audience.

It’s essential to understand your branding and why somebody would want to visit your website. The more insights you have, the more you’ll be able to understand what you want to achieve – without wasting your resources.

2. Analyze Search Intent

Search intent is the reason that encourages the audience to search for something and reach your website. But to analyze user search intent, you must first know your audience. Find out whether people are only looking for information or are willing to buy your product or service. Identify ways you can use focused content to target specific intents.

3. Create Engaging Content

Your content lies at the heart of everything. Keyword research provides great insights into the phrases your audience uses to find out what they are searching for.  You should use those keywords to come up with user-oriented content that matches their intent and objectives perfectly.

4. Analyze Your Competition

When devising your keyword strategy, take a good look at your competition. See what they are doing and how well they are ranking for the keywords that you wish to target. Also, see the kind of content they have and think of ways to improve your content.

5. Look at the Search Engines

When analyzing your competition, you’ll often use search engines to see how they are performing. Carrying out such searches will give you great insights into your competitors’ strategy. Plus, it will also help you understand what occurs when you type in your main focus keywords.

In specific markets, if you track developments over time, you may observe that search engines are increasingly providing answers that lead to no-click searches. So, always keep yourself updated with search engines. However, do not get obsessed with every minute algorithm update.

6. Analyze Data

Scrutinizing data plays a huge role in determining whether or not your keyword strategy is a success. Google Analytics helps you provide invaluable insights into your website performance. Even Google Search Console can give you plenty of opportunities to pursue.

It is imperative to keep an eye on your performance by checking your analytics regularly. However, you can’t observe excellent performance without producing content tailored to your strategy’s specific requirements and objectives.

Exhaustive keyword research will give you an idea of what you should target and how you should go about it. Consider using these insights to come up with content that’ll make your strategy successful.

Here’s what you can do:

• Create landing pages
• Produce specific kinds of content for the different search intents
• Create specific content to get featured snippets
• Create content optimized for voice search
• Introduce your mobile app
• Focus on video content

You have plenty of options that you should include in your keyword strategy. Regularly review your strategy to align it with the changing trends. Maybe the language of your users has changed, or a new competitor has been eating up your market share. Keep an eye on things and modify where needed.

15 Tips to Create PPC Keyword Strategies

As Google algorithm changes, you must adapt your PPC keyword strategies to follow suit. Otherwise, you can fall behind your competitors and lose your position in the search engine rankings.

Embrace and follow these steps to create an effective PPC keyword strategy:

1. Branding or Conversion Strategy

When developing a keyword strategy, the first thing you should consider is your advertising goal and objectives. Are you looking to get impressions for branding purposes, or do you want to drive them to your site and make a purchase?

Consider the following three types of strategies:

• Conversion – The motive behind this strategy is to draw traffic to your site or landing page and then converting them by making a purchase or performing a specific action like filling out a contact form, calling you, or downloading your whitepaper. The more specific your keywords are, the more conversions they’ll yield.
• Branding – This strategy allows you to value impressions over new leads or conversions. You aren’t targeting people to visit your website. You just want to be seen as a player for that particular keyword. Therefore, broad search terms are perhaps going to bring better results.
• Hybrid – It’s also possible to use a combination of both these strategies. Dedicate 90% of your keywords to the conversion strategy and the remaining 10% to branding and impressions. You’ll have to segment your keywords accordingly to fulfill your objectives.

2. Create a Topic List

Create a list of topics relevant to your niche that you can use to create content for your site. For instance, if you sell a marketing tool, you can create topics related to digital marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing, lead generation, and more.

3. Come Up With Keyword Ideas

With a topic list in hand, you need to include keywords relevant to each topic. Take a topic like ‘digital marketing’ and run it through a keyword research tool to find suggested keywords.

Some of the keywords that appear might include:

• digital marketing tools
• digital marketing campaign
• benefits of digital marketing

Along with keyword ideas, you are also producing more topic ideas. At this point, you aren’t finalizing your list of keywords. You are generating a few search terms that your audience is perhaps using to discover content like yours.

4. Research Short and Long-Tail Keywords

Use the keyword research tool to come up with both short- and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords include up to three words, while long-tail keywords include more than three words.

Short-tail keywords are also more competitive and generic. For instance, “digital marketing”. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are more specific, such as “how to make money with digital marketing.”

Choosing the right long-tail keywords is a great way to bring traffic and rank better in search engines.  It’s recommended to use both types of keywords as it’ll help you create a well-balanced keyword strategy. Short-tail keywords can snowball your traffic. However, long-tail keywords can bring the right kind of traffic more quickly that maps on exact match of the user search term.

5. Understand Customer Intent

When searching, a user has one of the following four different intents:

• Informational – you are seeking information.
• Navigational – you are searching for a particular website.
• Commercial – you are researching before buying something.
• Transactional – you are ready to make a purchase.

Knowing your users’ intent behind their search query will help you choose the right keywords and produce the right kind of content that improves your ranking.

Google works hard to understand searcher intent and match it up with valuable content that fulfills their specific needs. The more your content matches a particular need, the higher you will rank.

6. Categorize Your Keywords

The next step is to categorize your keywords according to topics. You’ll observe that some keywords are just synonyms of the same keyword. It’s okay to use them in the same piece of content.

Categorizing your keywords allows you to add certain keyword phrases to the right categories. For instance, if you have a category “social media marketing,” you can group related short- and long-tail keywords such as “what is social media marketing?” and “benefits of social media marketing.”

7. Select Your Primary and Secondary Keywords

For every piece of content you produce, you will have to optimize it for primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords. This is because these keywords have the potential to drive the most traffic to your site. So, you need to use them in your content.

When selecting your primary and secondary keywords, don’t go overboard. It is sufficient to have one primary keyword and two or three secondary keywords.

8. Map Keywords to the Right Landing Pages

To get the most out of your keyword research, it is vital to ensure there’s very high relevance between the keywords you use and the linked landing pages. Ensure your landing pages are optimized to handle your keyword traffic to make them relevant.

While conducting your keyword research, take the time to segment and categorize your keywords to map them to the right landing pages. If the landing page doesn’t exist on your website yet, then it’s time to build a new page for that particular set of keywords. This will help you achieve relevance, leading to more engaged visitors and better conversion rates.

9. Choose Keywords Based on More Than Just High Search Traffic

Just because a keyword has more searches doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a better performing search term. So, take the time to examine other factors that provide more granularity.

Here are some factors you may want to look at:

• Business relevance – It helps you judge how relevant a keyword is to your landing page. Though it’s a manual process, it’s an extremely important one as relevance ensures keyword success.
• Specificity – If you’re using a branding strategy, you should consider broad keywords. But if you’re using a conversion strategy, you should focus on long-tail keywords.
• Competition – If a large number of competitors are targeting the same keyword, you may want to consider other keywords that are less competitive, easier to rank for, and less expensive.
• Search volume – Go for keywords with a higher search volume as they indicate a better opportunity for visibility and traffic.
• Avg. CPC – It is an important factor as it has a direct impact on your overall cost. You need to know how keyword is cost to you in your campaign.
• Intent – It helps identify the type of keywords that are related to searcher intent.

10. Add Keywords in Your Content

Focus on producing valuable, in-depth content that solves the searcher’s problem. Your content must be original and enriched with real value. Include keywords to make your content more discoverable to the right audience. However, ensure that any keywords you include look natural. Even dynamic keyword insertion in landing page content makes it more appealing to the user when he finds content is matching with the search query intent.

11. Include Keywords in Your Title Tags

Title tags in HTML of landing page are fundamental when it comes to on-page optimization. They should include your primary keyword. However, make sure your title tags use natural human language.

12. Define Key Success Metrics

To measure your success, you should frequently analyze your analytics by tracking and analyzing keywords performance and observing visitors’ behavior when they visit your website or landing page. See how much time they are spending on your website. Track the average number of pages they are viewing. Also, keep an eye on your bounce rate.

A high bounce rate (such as 80%) indicates that most of your visitors leave your website immediately upon landing. They aren’t engaging with your content. You can fix this by modifying your landing page while still keeping it relevant to the keywords that first attracted the visitors.

Ensure that you set up your conversion goals within your analytics. This will help you see which keywords are bringing in traffic, as well as the percentage of that traffic that is converting.

Using these tips, you can measure keyword success. Otherwise, it will become more challenging to identify your best-performing keywords.

13. Leverage Social Networks to Provide Context for User Intent

Align your social networking efforts to help provide context to your targeted keywords. You can identify what your users want, need, as well as their sentiments. This will help you in constructing your landing pages with keyword-relevant content. And compel the customer from the social media sources as well to visit your landing page.

14. Focus on Your ROI

Your PPC keywords have a direct relationship with your ad spend and the quality of the results you get. For a good return on investment (ROI), you need to identify the keywords that generate the most relevant clicks for the cost.

A PPC keyword strategy can help you identify the best keywords to target in your PPC campaigns, depending on relevance, audience intent, and cost.

15. Discover Link-Building Opportunities

Link-building is perhaps the most challenging part of SEO. Before you can get new links, you need to figure out relevant sites that might be interested in linking to your site.

You can do so by looking for websites that use keywords relevant to your business. Many sites that regularly use the terms included in your keyword strategy are good targets for your link-building efforts. In fact, many of them might use your keywords as anchor text for outbound links in their content.

Wrap Up

Developing a keyword strategy can be time-consuming. The best part is that when you finalize your keyword strategy, you know exactly what you need to do. It gives you a plan to follow, saving you a ton of time later.

Even if you have the greatest product in the world, it doesn’t matter if no user or search engine can find it. Keyword research gives you that visibility. So, take the time to make relevant PPC keyword strategies for your business. This will provide insights into potential customers so that you can better market to them while improving your advertising ROI.