Step by Step Guide to Building a Great PPC Keyword List

A Four-Step Process to Get You on Your Way

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for…

All that Google Stuff is Too Technical for Me

or “If I had a dollar for every time I heard this…”

But we say Hogwash!

Yes, there are lots of advanced features and complexities to online advertising, but you don’t have to use them. You can get started in a very simple and quick manner.

Here’s your step-by-step guide for using Google to start getting more business today:

1) Go to Google’s Keyword Tool

a.  Select the “Website Content” option
b.  Enter the URL of your home page
c.  Scroll to the bottom and click the link to export the results to Excel

2) Create a Google AdWords Account (if you don’t have one)

3) Create your first campaign in your AdWords Account

a. Create Ad Groups from your Excel export

i. The common terms column translates into your ad groups – create one ad group for each unique common term

b. Put Keywords into your Ad Groups

i.…

How to Get a Great Quality Score

Three Key Steps to Get into the “In” Crowd

Quality Score is an important component of Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A great quality score will get your ads better exposure and actually save you money (which are the advertisers in Google’s “in” crowd). Conversely, if you let your quality score slip, Google will actually penalize you by increasing the cost for each click on your PPC ads (that would be the not “in” crowd). So, it’s time to spend some quality time on your quality score.

One of the most effective actions you can take to get a great quality score is to have “tightly knit” ad groups. That sounds easy enough.

However, the interpretations of “tightly knit ad group” we see varies quite a bit and is frequently the largest contributing factor to a poor quality score. Who…

Pay-Per-Click Can Save You Money

And Knowledge Can Equal Profitability

For the most part, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is all about goal achievement and profitability. However, there are situations when spending PPC dollars to attain valuable knowledge can lead to great cost savings for your business.

PPC is a truly unique medium – enabling you to test business strategies on volumes of people across the world in very short time periods. Given its speedy broad reach, it is a valuable data-mining tool that can help you make informed decisions.

Here are three key situations in which PPC can help your business save money:

1) New Marketing Message or Positioning

New marketing positioning is a very expensive venture. It often involves changes to your website, marketing materials, sales materials, employee training and more. PPC is a great way to get a lot of exposure fast and see…

An Efficient Check List for Starting a PPC Campaign

Five Clear Steps Before Getting Started

Many people think starting a PPC campaign is as easy as opening up a Google, Yahoo!, and Bing ad center account, writing some quick ads and then watching the clicks and dollars roll in.

Were it only so simple.

Although PPC campaigns do give you results faster than a SEO campaign, starting a PPC campaign does require some up-front work on your part. You’ll want to use the following checklist to ensure you have everything needed to make a smooth PPC transition.

1. Determine your budget.

If you’re spending less than $500 a month, you might want to consider a single search engine such as Google or Bing. Why is that? Spreading such a relatively low budget across three search engines won’t give you enough bang for your buck.

Generally speaking, we recommend a minimum…