Get Started on Creating a Great PPC Keyword List

February 1, 2007 by Derek Vaughan

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.