For some marketers, especially B2B companies, the holidays may be a time of year when things slow down, which can be the perfect opportunity to thoroughly cleanse your PPC account and get it to deliver more bang for your buck. On the heels of my blog post on landing page optimization, here are 10 ways to make your PPC campaign more profitable.

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1. Make changes that matter.


Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.

Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:

2. Create better targeted ad groups.


Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.

Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.

3. Curate your negative keyword lists.


Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.

4. Use broad match modifiers.

If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.

Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.

5. Test your ads.


Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.

Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?

6. Filter out unwanted clicks.


Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.

7. Use match types to control bids.

Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.

8. Show ads at the right time.


After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.

I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.

9. Improve device targeting.

Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.

10. Conduct landing page optimization.

Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.

Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI:

Unbeatable keyword research is important. If you have a blog or website and want to get ranked in the search engines, then you probably already know that proper keyword research is one of the most important things you can do. In fact, without it, you will find that you are relegated to the bottom of the search engine results and while you may have the best product or service in your niche, no one will be able to find you!

Here are 5 keyword research tips that will help get your site to the top of the Search Engine results:

1. Breaking Down Your Niche

Unless your chosen niche is a very small subniche of something else already, you’re going to want to take a look at a broad range of keywords in your overall niche to figure out where your site can best fit.

While you can eventually compete for broad terms like “weight loss”, “search engine optimization”, “dating”, “health insurance” etc… these larger keyword phrases are extremely competitive and it could take quite some time to make traction in the search engines. Therefore, it’s usually best to find some sub-niches within these areas where you can start to rank and get traffic in less time.

What you want to do is go to the google keywords tool and type in your broad keyword phrase. From the list of keywords that comes up, you will want to pick some sub niches that look interesting to you and match with what your site is about.

For example, when I searched on the main term “weight loss”, I came up with some interesting terms such as:

Healthy weight loss
Weight loss programs
Exercise for weight loss
Weight loss for men
Effective weight loss
Weight loss guide
Weight loss information

Now what you want to do is take each of the terms that seem interesting to you from this list and then type those into the keywords tool, to get even more keyword phrases. Make note of all the sub niches that have a good amount of keyword phrases in them and consider making those the focus of your website.

When doing so, pay attention to the amount of searches each phrase gets – it doesn’t make much sense to go after keywords that get only 10 searches a month! My advice is to set the “match type” (at the top right) to “exact” and weed out anything that gets less than 1900 searches a month.

2. Going Wide

Sometimes you have to think out of the box and investigate keyword phrases that don’t have your main keyword term within them. Think about your niche and try to come up with some related topics that people might be interested in.

Sometimes if you look at the very bottom of the results that you get with the google keyword tool, you can get some ideas from there. For example, in the weight loss niche, you might also consider researching keywords that have the root phrase exercise, plus size, fat loss etc…

Going wide with your keyword research can add value to your website as you will be able to address all the different issues that your visitors might want to know about.

3. Long Tail, Short Tail or Medium Tail?

If you’ve been around internet marketing for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard the term “long tail keywords”. These are simply keyword phrases that have more “words” in them. Internet marketers like them because they are very targeted and usually “buying” keywords meaning that the person searching for that phrase is looking to buy that item.

For example the long tail phrase “green tea weight loss supplements” would be great to target if you have a page that sells green tea weight loss supplements. The person typing that phrase into Google is in all likelihood looking to buy such a product and you can typically expect a high conversion rate.

The great thing about long tail keyword phrases is that they typically have little competition so you can easily rank for that keyword phrase. The bad thing about long tail keyword phrases is that they don’t usually get a lot of traffic. So, you need to include long tail, short tail and everything in between in your keyword research strategy. Personally I would not go for any keyword phrase that gets less then 1900 exact searches a month.

The long tail phrases will allow you to start getting traffic right away but unless you have a ton of them you won’t ever be able to get a significant amount of traffic just from the long tail. This is fine if you plan to have a bunch of small niche blogs that dribble in traffic, but if you plan to build an authority type site, then you will want to include the more competitive keywords too. The long tail keywords can help you build your site while you are waiting to rank for the more competitive terms.

4. Using Your Own Stats

If you are already getting some traffic to your blog, the best way to find out what people are looking for is to look right in your stats and see what keywords your site is being found for. Using this method, I’ve found quite a few keywords that were not uncovered by any keyword tool!

Looking at your stats can give you insight as to what your visitors want as well as what the search engines think your site is about and can spawn a whole new list of keyword ideas.

5. Sizing Up The Competition

Once you have your keyword list, you need to figure out if the keywords are worth putting effort into. This means checking out the other sites that rank for that keyword and trying to see if you can “beat” them.

Now there are a lot of ways to “check out” the competition. I know some people look in google for the keyword phrase in quotes and if there are less than 10,000 competing sites, they deem it worthy of adding to their list. Another thing you can do is type allintitle:”keyword phrase” into the Google search bar to see who is targeting the keyword phrase in the title.

While these will both give you an idea of the amount of pages that use that keyword and who is using onsite SEO for that phrase, I think that the best way to determine if you can rank in the top 3 spots is to just search for the keyword in Google (without quotes) and see who the top 10 ranking pages are now.

What you want to look for is the PR of the page, the age of the domain, the number of links to the page and the strength (or PR) of those links. Then you need to make some sort of determination as to whether or not you can do similar off-page SEO in order to rank your page for that term.

Finding the right keywords to target on your blog or website is the first crucial step in getting targeted organic traffic from the search engines. If you do this step correctly, you will start to see a steady stream of targeted traffic that just keeps growing and growing!

Guest author Lee Dobbins is a full time internet marketer that specializes in website development and promotion. Visit Website Promotion Blueprint for more on how to get targeted traffic to your blog and don’t forget to sign up for her FREE 10 Step Link Building Process Ebook and Spreadsheet that will help you organize your link building efforts and start a flood of traffic to your website. You can also write guest articles and share your SEO tips.

Keyword research is a vital first step to any Internet marketing plan. Fail to take this step and you are going to have a very difficult time making money on the web.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is critical because it tells you the exact phrases potential customers or clients are using to search for your service or product. Put in practical terms, the research will reveal the problems your prospects are having. Your job is to provide solutions on your site to those problems. If you provide a quality solution, prospects will gladly convert into paying customers. It really is that simple.

Keyword research can be done in a couple of ways, but I prefer using the Word Tracker program. This program is really the key to everything you will do on the net. You can read how to use Wordtracker here, but a quick overview should show you the value.

Assume I want to start or have a dog grooming business providing grooming services and selling grooming products. I would log into Wordtracker and do a search for all keyword phrases related to “dog grooming”. Here are a few of the keyword phrases being used by my potential customers:

• Dog grooming
• Dog grooming supplies
• Dog grooming supply
• Dog grooming products
• Professional dog grooming products
• Dog grooming tools
• Dog grooming tips

You would expect to see a number of these phrases, but a few are surprises. “Dog grooming tools” is one I didn’t expect, which means there may be a marketing opportunity. To verify this, we use an additional tool provided by Wordtracker.

Wordtracker gives you the ability to perform “competition analysis” for keywords. Essentially, this tells you how many hits you can expect for a keyword and the number of other sites trying to get rankings for it.

Having performed a competition analysis on the above keywords, I find a couple of prime marketing opportunities. “Professional dog grooming products” has roughly 60 searches a day and only 372 sites trying to get ranked under the phrase. On the other had, dog grooming tools has over 12,000 sites trying to get ranked under it. What this research tells me is I should focus on professional dog grooming products instead of the tools keyword phrase.

Obviously, this example represents an analysis of only one keyword phrase. When you do keyword research, you want to run the analysis on all phrases related to your site, service and/or product.