11
2009
Mar

Structure > Keywords

In Adwords keywords are, well… key. There’s no denying that. Personally however, I believe that structure is ultimately more important than the keywords. Picking keywords isn’t really where the magic happens. Most business owners can come up with a semi-decent keyword list on their own, but the disconnect is in the implementation. Deciding how to structure these keywords into groups is where you go from a dude with a bucket full of keywords to a man with a plan.

We take over a lot of existing Adwords accounts and one of the most common mistakes we see is the Bucket campaign. A bucket is where you have done all your keyword research and then dumped all the keywords into one ad group. This isn’t a good way to run an account. In Adwords the goal is to match the topic of your ad as closely to the user query as possible. To succeed at Adwords you need to divide your ad groups down to the smallest unit possible and then target your ad text to that subject and land your visitors on the most relevant page possible. To take the time to do it right is good for your click through rates, your quality score, the user’s experience, and most importantly your conversion rate.

What I do first when setting up an account is pull together every possible keyword. I parse through the site, the individual products, competitor’s sites, enthusiast sites, and industry sites looking for keyword inspiration and collect it all in an Excel file. Once that monster list of keywords is in place, start looking for themes and trends in it. When I start to find trends or clusters of similar words I drag them into their own columns (having a dual monitor set up can be really useful for this!). To help illustrate, let’s pretend we’re working on a surf shop’s web site. You would break their keyword list into: surfboards, wetsuits, board shorts, footwear, t-shirts, hats, etc.

Once you have your first sort completed start looking at your columns of keywords, how can this be separated even more? Let’s start by looking at wetsuits. Your wetsuits can be broken down into general keywords (wetsuit), branded keywords (Body Glove, O’Neil, Blueseventy, Billabong, Aquasphere, etc.), and style of wetsuit (full suits, hooded suits, spring suits, triathlon suits). If appropriate you may even want to take some of these groups and break them into even smaller pieces by product within your brands (Blueseventy Helix, Blueseventy Point Zero, Blueseventy Reaction), or whatever logical grouping you may have available. An ad with a headline like “BlueSeventy Helix Wetsuit” is going to capture a lot more quality traffic than one that reads “Surf Shop Deals Here.”

I realize what I’ve laid out here is a lot of work, but right and easy aren’t typically the same thing. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and make the process from search to purchase as easy as possible. Doing things right the first time will save you a lot of time and money down the road.