PPC Optimization: Keyword Phrases

Pay per click (PPC) advertising can bring you a tidal wave of traffic. Or it can give you a mere trickle like a leaky faucet. Sometimes, it's the little things that make the difference.

I just want to show you one little trick you can use that can make a big difference in the effectiveness of your PPC advertising. In fact, I'll show how you can use the *same* keywords and get much more traffic than most people.

The trick I'm going to show you here works with Google AdWords, but it may not work with every PPC search engine. And it works best when you're bidding on keyword phrases that contain more than one word.

With Google AdWords, there are at least three different ways you can bid on a single keyword phrase. The simplest way is to just enter the phrase you want to bid on. For example, let's imagine that I have a web site about healthy eating. I might bid on the following keyword phrase:

health food

This means that I'm bidding on any search that includes both of those words. So my ad would show up if someone searched for any of the following phrases:

health food
food that's good for your health
food that's bad for your health

You can see that I may not want my ad to appear for all of those searches. Some of them won't be relevant.

According to Google's estimate, my ad would be (on average) 8.8 in the list of all AdWord ads for that phrase. And I would receive approximately 9.1 clicks on my ad each day (on average).

But there are a couple of options I can use when I place my bid on those keywords. And these might get me a lot more or a lot less clicks. And it might make my ad more relevant to the search terms. Instead of just entering the keyword phrase as I did above, I could bid on this:

"health food"

Putting the quotes around the words changes what I'm bidding on. Now I'm only bidding on search terms that include the exact phrase "health food". Those two words have to be together and in that order in the search term. So my ad would appear for phrases such as:

health food
health food recipes

But it wouldn't appear for phrases such as:

food that's bad for my health
how food affects my health

According to Google's estimate, my ad would be (on average) 8.6 in the list of all AdWord ads for that phrase. And I would receive approximately 12 clicks on my ad each day (on average).

Lastly, I can narrow the relevance of my keyword phrase even more. I can enter it like this:

[health food]

This means that my ad will only appear if someone searches specifically for:

health food

And it won't appear for any other search terms. The search must include only those two words in that order. My ad will only appear for people who search for my keyword phrase exactly. So it won't appear if someone searches for phrases like:

health food recipes
vegetarian health food

According to Google's estimate, my ad would be (on average) 8 in the list of all AdWord ads for that phrase. And I would receive approximately 2.1 clicks on my ad each day (on average).

You can see that there are some significant differences in the amount of traffic I would get from each of these different bids. In this case, I may do best by bidding on "health food". It would get me about 300 clicks a month more than [health food]. And it would get me about 90 clicks a month more than the words without quotes.

And that's just for a single keyword phrase.

You may have noticed that the term [health food] was still positioned about the same as the other two terms (a little better even). But it would have received *much* fewer clicks. This is probably because far fewer people search for health food without any other words.

So when you set up your next AdWords campaign (or when you check your current campaigns), you should check which of these methods will get you the most clicks for some of your more popular keyword phrases.