Google says that there are 151,000,000 searches a month for the word “car.” Question…Is it more important to therefore try to rank organically for the word “car,” to try and capture traffic from those hundreds of millions of searches and compete against every other website going after “car” searches? Or should you focus your efforts on other more specific keywords that are more relevant to your brand and you have greater potential to rank for?

Below are some thoughts and questions you should ask yourself about keywords when you are building a site, adding a page, or even naming a product:

1. Just because you call your product something, doesn’t mean that a consumer is searching for your product that way
   • A car can be searched for many different ways: sedan, coupe, Ferrari, sports car, two door sedan, red car, best sports car, which car is better, Ferrari that was in Ferris Bueller’s Day off

   When trying to find keywords for your site, make sure that the keywords make sense for your brand and what the product actually is; this will help them rank better in the long run.

2. Make sure to check out how competitive the search landscape is
   • If you are a smaller website, it might be better to focus less on the broad, very high traffic keyword “cars” and put more effort into the “red four-door sedan” keyword which doesn’t have big companies competing for that space.

   Just because consumers conduct 1,000,000 searches a month for a specific keyword, doesn’t mean you will get any traffic from it, if you are not ranking on the first page or second page of the results. So do your competitive landscape analysis and find the right keyword.

3. Map Your Keywords across your site
   • Why cannibalize your own keywords? Find unique keywords per page that you can optimize and have the possibility of ranking for all of them

   Make sure to focus each page to two or three specific keywords and use each keyword two to three times in the content.


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In the spirit of optimization, we often sit in on online seminars about new technologies or topics important to our industry. Gotta keep this machine well-oiled! I recently sat in on a search marketing web seminar that was all about keyword research. Now, as these things tend to be, it was largely a sales pitch. Hrmpf. But, it did provide a nice reiteration of some best practices (so quick nod to the host of the webinar, paid search reporting platform, ClickEquations).

This inspired me to spread the continuing education love and share some small steps you must be taking in your keyword research and selection to make your paid search advertising campaigns successful.

Before you set up a campaign, you always start with your planning phase—the volume research, the competitive analysis, etc. This is an important phase. More important, though, is what comes after you launch your campaign: the keyword optimization. It’s important that you keep an eye on your keywords, measure performance, and use your findings to perfect your paid efforts.

Things to look for during the keyword optimization phase:

Absolutely review your search query reports regularly

• This tells you what detailed searches your visitors are actually finding you through and can drive a lot of your decisions regarding bidding strategies, budgets, negative keywords and more.

Look for themes and opportunities to break out campaigns or ad groups

• Your search query reports should start to reveal some behavioral trends among your visitors and give you ideas about how to narrow down your messages into more targeted ad groups.

Implement Exact Match on well-performing words

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