In order to take greatest advantage of pay-per-click advertising opportunities, one must first develop a truly great keyword list. The key to a great list is to generate a vast and deep set of search phrases that are targeted to your goods and services. The reason that a vast list is better than a shorter list is this: you are only charged when someone actually clicks on your ad. Therefore, even if the search term gets only 1 quality click per week - you should use it anyway - as it doesn`t cost you anything to use the keyword unless you recieve a productive business lead from it.
Here are a few tips to get you started. First, start with the most basic keyword phrase that describes what you are selling at your site. For our example we`ll use a site that sells specialty dog food. The list of basic keyword phrases might be:
pet
dog food
Let`s start with these. Now, in order to build out a much broader and targeted list very quickly, we will use a great and free online keyword generating tool:
Yahoo Search Marketing`s Keyword Selector Tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
We`ll input our targeted search phrases into the tool and display the top results below. Note that there are often many more than just the results shown below, but the technique described is the same for any additional keyword phrases.
First we`ll input `pet` first (you can then repeat the same process with `dog food` later) - here are the top few results:
| Number of Searches in the Previous Month |
Keyword Phrase |
| 566,326 |
pet |
| 252,871 |
pet supply |
| 113,835 |
pet store |
| 106,676 |
apartment for rent with pet |
| 106,473 |
apartment pet search |
| 105,919 |
pet finder apartment |
| 105,261 |
pet shop boy |
| 59,088 |
pet supply store |
| 56,478 |
pet grooming |
| 54,566 |
pet adoption |
| 49,307 |
pet services |
| 44,527 |
pet shop |
| 35,043 |
littlest pet shop |
| 33,044 |
pet sitting services |
| 32,999 |
virtual pet |
| 32,955 |
pet boarding |
| 32,368 |
pet product |
| 29,962 |
pet health |
| 28,700 |
pet for sale |
| 27,790 |
be your own pet |
| 25,996 |
pet insurance |
| 22,105 |
pet name |
| 19,774 |
pet care |
The number on the left refers to the amount of searches conducted the previous month at Yahoo Search Marketing. This gives you an idea of a search phrase`s relative popularity. The next step is to remove those terms that are not related to your business - here is the truncated list:
| Number of Searches in the Previous Month |
Keyword Phrase |
| 566,326 |
pet |
| 252,871 |
pet supply |
| 113,835 |
pet store |
| 59,088 |
pet supply store |
| 49,307 |
pet services |
| 44,527 |
pet shop |
| 35,043 |
littlest pet shop |
| 32,368 |
pet product |
| 29,962 |
pet health |
| 19,774 |
pet care |
So now we have created 10 good search terms. The next step is to input each of the ten terms back into the Yahoo Search Marketing tool to generate even more search terms. So when we input the search phrase `pet supply` into the tool we get:
| Number of Searches in the Previous Month |
Keyword Phrase |
| 59,088 |
pet supply store |
| 9,979 |
pet supply plus |
| 7,360 |
wholesale pet supply |
| 6,799 |
discount pet supply |
| 5,743 |
online pet supply |
| 3,461 |
pet supply catalog |
| 2,834 |
pet bird supply |
| 1,879 |
pet grooming supply |
| 1,095 |
pet supply plus store |
| 1,029 |
online pet supply store |
| 899 |
pet supply chicago |
| 851 |
ryans pet supply |
| 754 |
pet food supply |
| 747 |
jeffers pet supply |
| 659 |
cheap pet supply |
| 629 |
care a lot pet supply |
| 627 |
dr foster and smith pet supply |
| 538 |
foster and smith pet supply |
| 522 |
dog pet supply |
| 497 |
pet supply distributor |
Again, it is important to now remove those terms that don`t apply to your business and arrive at a truncated list. Simply repeat this process over and over with each search term. Your pay-per-click list will soon grow to a large size.
One more step that will really help to generate a larger and even more targeted list. Come up with a list of `prefixes` that describe your store`s niche. So if you are a discount store, your list of `prefixes` may be: discount, affordable, cheap, low cost, economy, etc.
You can then add these `prefixes` to your current search phrase list in order to create an even deeper search list. To use the first ten search phrases we created you would then arrive at a list that contains:
| cheap pet |
| cheap pet supply |
| cheap pet store |
| cheap pet supply store |
| cheap pet services |
| cheap pet shop |
| cheap littlest pet shop |
| cheap pet product |
| cheap pet health |
| cheap pet care |
Remember to always check the relevancy of the terms you create to make sure that they will be reaching the targeted traffic that will purchase your products and services. Good luck creating your targeted pay-per-click search term list!
About Derek Vaughan
Derek Vaughan appears courtesy of the hosting experts at TechPad Agency.
