PPC Keyword Expansion Tutorial

Keyword expansion is a vital part of any PPC campaign. Sure, you can cover all of the variations you want by broad matching on “widgets”, but you’ll just be able to bid one amount across the board, show one set of ad creatives and land the user on just one page. By expanding your campaign you can use different CPC values for “cheap blue widgets” and “quality red widgets” depending on conversion rate and average transaction value, and you can also refine your ad text and landing pages to ensure that you capture and maintain the buyer’s interest throughout their journey from click to order.

Keyword expansion is a surefire way to reduce campaign costs, increase traffic and optimise conversion.

Planning Your Campaign

The first step in every keyword expansion project is to decide on the structure of your campaigns - just hammering out keywords straight away is not going to get you the best results. Sit down and plan how you want to lay out your adgroups. In the example of a widget shop, you might have campaigns like this:

• Generic widgets - plain “widget” related keywords. “widgets”, “cheap widgets”, “widgets online” etc.
• Red widgets - keywords related to red widgets - so “red widget”, “red widgets”, “cheap red widget”, “red widgets uk”.
• Green widgets - keywords related to green widgets, similar to Red widgets above.
• Widget accessories - keywords such as “widget sprockets”, “cheap sprockets”, “widget accessories”
• Brand - keywords related to the name of your site “widgetsite.com”, “widget site com”, “the widget site”.

Obviously a real shop is going to have a vastly bigger range of products and categories, and you’ll need to think carefully how to cover all of the variations.

Keyword Research Tools

Once you’ve got your account structure finished you can start filling in base keywords for each different section. This is where comprehensive keyword research is vital - you need to ensure that you are covering all of the keywords in your niche’s particular universe, and that you are using language that your users relate to, not just terms that are used within your company. Some great keyword research tools include Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, and Hitwise. You can also get comparitive traffic volumes for key terms from Google Trends and Alexa WebRankings.

Try and fill in a set of core keywords for each of the campaigns and adgroups in your account design. Make sure you include synonyms and spelling errors.

The Red Widgets Example

Once you’ve got there, you’re ready to start generating keywords for each adgroup in earnest. For our example, lets use the “red widgets” adgroup. The base keywords we’ve come up with are:

• Red Widgets
• Red Widget
• Red Wigets
• Red Wiget
• Red Widjets
• Red Widget
• RedWidgets
• RedWidget

Keyword Generation

There are many pieces of keyword generation software available on the web - some for free, some for a small charge. You need to chose the one that is most appropriate for your needs, but for our example we’ll use our free keyword generator web application. Fire this up, and put your base keywords in the third column:

In the first column, lets put some call to action keywords, in this simple case, “buy” and “find” are a good start. Not all users looking for “red widgets” will type “buy” or “find”, but some will - so select the “Optional” tickbox:

In the second column, lets put some adjectives that users might use to describe the sort of red widgets they’re looking for. The market for red widgets is competitive, so a value proposition is a good one, but quality is also important. Lets go for “cheap”, “cheapest”, “low price”, “low cost”, “discount”, “best”, “quality”. You also might like to consider words like “newest” or “latest”. Again, select this column as “Optional”.

In the fourth column lets capture users that want to buy online, so lets add “online”, “on line”, and users that specify that they’re looking for a shop, so “shop”, “shops”, “store”, “stores”. Again this will be “Optional”.

Finally, in the fifth column, lets capture locational searches, so “uk”, “england”, “britain”, “britian”, “london”. Again, this column should be “Optional”. Note that if your searchers are very specific about the location that they want to buy from then you may want to create a separate adgroup for each area - you can then refer to their location in the ad text.

Now before we generate our keywords, we need to select what match types we want to use. Again, generally speaking, the more the merrier, so lets select all three: “Standard Match”, “Phrase Match” and “Exact Match”. Your form should look like this:

Now click on “Generate Keywords”. Wait a little while.

You’ll see that the Keyword Generator has now generated 24,192 keywords! Probably you’d want to refine your choices a bit based on the learnings from your keyword research. Once you’re done, simply copy and paste these into Adwords or the Adwords Editor, and away you go. You’ll now have a fully expanded red widgets adgroup!