Not very long ago, a phone book provided a useful index of businesses and services in a local community. It was the lifeblood of many businesses’ marketing strategies because a well-placed listing could call attention to an interested audience, and provide leads for several months. Today, Google Ads has taken over that role, with an index that stretches across millions and millions of business listings. Google Ads are an important part of a small business’s marketing strategy because they help it stand out based on useful search terms and keywords. However, knowing which keywords to begin with may be difficult. Thankfully, with some careful keyword research for Google Ads, you’ll be able to create a solid strategy for your ad campaign.
Conducting Keyword Research
Let’s walk you through our process. For a new Set Fire Creative client, the first source for keyword research originates from the onboarding document. When our team onboards you, we ask you about competitors in their field, your local area, or if you have a list in your mind of keywords they feel might describe your services or industry. If you provide a list of keywords, some of these may not be eligible to bid on or might be too broad for effective targeting, but it helps our team visualize relevant terms to target. If the list of competitors was provided, we scrape the competing websites, as well as your own URL, through Google Keyword Planner to help pull relevant and high-volume keywords. This initial step simplifies Google Ads keyword research by relying on Google’s own database of keywords.
After that, we then run the scraped keywords through Google Keyword Planner by themselves within the target market to find other relevant terms to start with. We may also rely on SpyFu to scrape competitors’ websites for keywords based on the volume of suggestions from Google Keyword Planner. Generally, Google Keyword Planner is the preferred source for this because it’s a first-party tool and provides the most in-depth and most recent Keyword Research. However, SpyFu’s keyword research also allows us to view past ads/ad campaigns run by competitors and their effectiveness, which can help us identify other relevant keywords. If your website or your competitors don’t rank for many keywords for a given reason, we perform this process fairly frequently to help keep a pulse on relevant keywords as the website ranks higher through scaling.
Why Are Keywords So Important?
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Keyword Ad Groups form the backbone of your Google Ad Campaigns. They prove to Google that your website or landing page is relevant to a potential customer’s search. When you organically list relevant keywords throughout your website, that will help it stand out in Google’s search algorithm. However, Google is constantly changing the search algorithm so that old methods of “cheating” the system won’t work. A few years ago, a website could rank high for SEO and Google Ads by hiding keywords in the website background. Today, they look for natural, organic usage—so old tricks like that won’t work anymore. This also means that keyword research for Google Ads should be conducted fairly regularly to ensure that your Google Ads can bid on new phrases and keyword variations.
What If I Don’t Know Where To Start?
Marketing is a difficult endeavor for a small business owner who is still trying to figure out how to scale their business. At Set Fire Creative, our goal is to handle the major marketing questions and concerns in order to let you focus your attention completely on logistics and management. We’re passionate about helping businesses scale, and our team has helped other businesses throughout the years reach new heights! If you feel like Set fire Creative would be a good fit for your business, contact us today to learn more about our methods!
P.S. We just made Big Leap’s list of Top 29 Partners. Let us know if we can introduce you to anyone on the list!
Matthew is a Brand Strategist who has a passion for learning, and for improving the world around him. He does this by helping share the stories small businesses have to share and building bonds between businesses and communities. He’s currently working through a movie marathon of all the Academy Awards Best Picture winners.
