Make no mistake about it, if you are running a keyword led campaign then your keywords will have more impact on your profitability that anything else. As I mentioned before then I know of people making thousands and thousands of dollars a month off just ONE keyword phrase.

So what is a keyword or keyword phrase?
A keyword is just a word that you think someone would type into a search engine either to find a product like you are selling, or just to find information on a topic related to what you are selling. I like to call it a keyword phrase as it will usually consist of multiple words like, ‘How to fish for Salmon’, but you’ll typically see them just referred to as keywords (some people call them ‘long tail keywords’).

To pick successful keywords you need to do one of two things:

1) Get inside the head of your prospect,
or
2) Copy what someone else is doing.

If you want to get into the head of your prospect then you have to think like they would if they were searching for information, what would they search for? What terms would they use? What are their problems or their desires?

Or you can find keywords where people are already advertising products like yours and spy on them to see if they are still advertising 30 days later. If they are then the chances are that they are making money so it will be a good choice.

Of course the problem with this kind of competitive intelligence is that it does not take into account other factors. For instance the competitors campaign could be making them money, but they are making money off some other keywords not the one you are looking at, so you copy the losing keyword and lose money! But either way you are going to want to brainstorm possible keywords and find out their monthly search volume so you know roughly how many people will see your ad.

Free keyword tools:
You can use these free tools to help you generate a list:
* http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
* http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (Good when it works, but often has trouble)
* https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Just type in a keyword you think someone would search with and those tools will spit out a whole host of related search terms and the amount of times per month they are searched for. There is no right and wrong answer about how many searches a day makes a good keyword, a good keyword is one that turns into sales, there is no point having lots of searches if they don’t convert to sales!

Try to think of ‘buying’ keywords, for instance, ‘blue widget’ is a lot less valuable to you than ‘buy blue widget’ as you know the second phrase is a person looking to buy, the first person could just be looking for information.

Grouping keywords
Google used to be very easy to use, but due to widespread abuse and also to sort the professional people out from the amateurs who can’t be bothered to put in the effort, then Google has introduced a lot of different measures to make sure they deliver quality ads to the right audience.

What this means is that your whole account and specifically your campaigns and keywords will have a ‘quality score’ assigned to them (more on that later) and in order to have a good quality score you must first group your keywords so they are relevant to each other.

You used to be able to put 1000 keywords in an ad group and just let that run, but not anymore. Now it is more like 10 – 20 keywords maximum. Plus you need to make sure that they all contain the same phrase in them to help you get the best score possible, so let’s look at an example set of fake keywords:

Best blue widgets
Which blue widgets are the best
Blue widgets from Spain
Buy cheapest blue widgets
Spain Cheap blue widgets
What are the cheapest blue widgets
Excellent blue widgets
Blue electric widgets

So I would split these as follows:

Ad group 1: Best Blue Widgets
• Best blue widgets
• Which blue widgets are the best

Ad group 2: Blue widgets Spain
• Blue widgets from Spain
• Spain Cheap blue widgets

Ad group 3: Cheapest blue widgets
• Buy cheapest blue widgets
• What are the cheapest blue widgets

Ad group 4: Blue widgets
• Excellent blue widgets
• Blue electric widgets

You can see above how any keywords with the same kind of phrases in are grouped together.