As with any effective marketing tool, the key to driving a successful campaign is with thorough research and understanding of the competition. Below is a brief how-to-guide to navigate a successful PPC campaign. Along with these tips, there are also some free tools available to further guide and assist you.

1. How to Master Competitive Keyword Research
for Your PPC Campaign
Image Source: ShutterStock.com
Finding the right words for a paid search campaign is usually always easier said than
done; however, as any marketer should know, keyword research is the cornerstone of
any PPC successful campaign. While both a science and an art, mastering competitive
keyword research demands that you are able to understand your audience well enough
in order to predict what they’re going to be typing in the search box.
As with any effective marketing tool, the key to driving a successful campaign is
with thorough research and understanding of the competition. Below is a brief
how-to-guide to navigate a successful PPC campaign. Along with these tips, there are
also some free tools available to further guide and assist you:

2. GETTING STARTED: Research and Brainstorming
First things, first — determine which landing pages to focus on. Gleen your most
relevant keywords and phrases from those pages before moving on to optimizing
others.
keywords are categorized into basic “term” categories although there are often
variations to these titles, and they can also be explained in more depth. Let’s use the
siteClickClickMedia as an example:
 Brand name terms and other trademarks (ClickClickMedia.com.au or
ClickClickMedia)
 Generic terms relating to a product or service (Google AdWords services,
Organic Search services, Facebook ads services, PPC services, etc.)
 Related terms not specific, but still related to a name, brand or service (what is
PPC? PPC consultation, PPC blog, etc.)
 Competitor terms those offering similar products and services (Depending on
who your competitors are and how they’re ranking with their current terms,choose
your keywords wisely based on the authority of the competitor’s site, as well
as other factors.
 Negative terms that a brand should not be associated with (The last thing you
want is for your brand’s advertisements appear to be associated with otherwise
offensive ads. Try your best to avoid using money terms such as “free” and/or
“cheap” when choosing keywords.)
Develop your list of keywords by starting with long tail or broad terms, then narrow the
list down to more specific terms and phrases.
For example, if you were selling women’s running shoes, your list might look something
like this:
Marketing services – > Online marketing services – > Paid Search Online
marketing services – > PPC marketing services
PUT YOUR WORDS TO WORK: Google Keyword
Planner
Plug your keywords and phrases into the Google Keyword Planner for more valuable
information. In most cases, Google ranks the search terms and phrases with a
competition grade of high, medium and low. The more popular the search phrase, the
more expensive the cost.

3. Find a middle ground — somewhere between search phrases that are rarely used and
therefore ineffective — and try to fall short of competition rates that are so high your
budget will eaten up too quickly.
PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR SHOES: Variations and
Concatenation
Think of all the variations for any given product. Take the shoe industry for example.
Depending on the geographical location, some customers may be more familiar with the
terms “sneakers” or “tennis shoes” instead of “running shoes.” Although a thesaurus or
synonym resource can give you further assistance when searching for similar titles or
descriptive words, a free “Concatenation” site offers a pick-and-choose platform that
creates different combinations of your selected terms. Using the shoe example.
Image Source: http://www.wordstream.com/images/concatenate-ppc-keyword-
research.png
CHECK OUT THE COMPETITION – Learn from them
Many find moral or ethical dilemmas when “spying on the competition” but in the
business world, particularly in the marketing industry, competitive research is nothing
new. Given that much of the information a business would need is likely already publicly

4. available in public records, it only makes sense to gather this data from your
competition to get a sense of how they’re leveraging their keywords and analyze their
metrics.
Using Google AdWords Opportunities, you can get an in-depth look overview of your
online competitors:
Image Source: http://ppchero.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/analyzecompetition.jpg
There are a variety of keyword research tools that can be found online at little to no
cost, but keep in mind that not all tools are built the same. While it may take a bit of trial-
and-error to find the right tool that works for your PPC goals, the key statistic you’ll
always want to pay attention to is search volume. The higher the search volume is for
a particular keyword, the more people are searching for that given phrase or term per
month.
Depending on what the search volume is for a certain term, the next phase in the
keyword process will be to further narrow down your list to determine which ones to
keep and which ones to drop. Your goal here is to choose the best-performing terms
that will give you the most traffic without breaking the bank.
And finally, make sure to keep up with your competitive research! While spending more
than 15% of your PPC management time on keyword research is not recommended,
researching competitors is extremely crucial to the success of any marketing campaign,
paid or organic.