Improving Your Google Ads with Search Engine Optimized Keywords
By now, most marketers are aware that paid ads are essential for any inbound marketing strategy. But most aren’t aware that search engine optimized SEO keywords can help direct your Google Ads to your target audience and maximize your conversion rates. In fact, leads driven by SEO keywords boast a nearly 15 percent close rate. Compare that to the average 1.7 percent close rate for outbound marketing leads, and you will see the power of using keywords relevant to your industry, products and services. For the best results, however, you must accurately select and apply the most effective keywords for your company.
With the right keywords and techniques, you can drive traffic to your website, build brand loyalty and increase interest in your products and services. Unfortunately, Google is constantly changing their algorithms to improve their search results and encourage the creation of quality web content. With hundreds of these rapid-fire updates performed each year, it can be difficult to know which keywords and techniques will work best for your Google Ads campaigns. To learn what you need to know, utilize this informative guide about writing effective Google Ads using SEO keywords.
Google Ads: Importance of SEO Keywords
Search engine optimized keywords allow users to find specific content using their favorite search engines. For the majority of internet users, Google remains the preferred and most used search engine. When you infuse SEO keywords into your Google Ads, you direct your advertisements right to the people looking for that content.
Essentially, ads written with SEO keywords help bring prospective clients to your website and entice them to make a purchase. In addition, the keywords help position your ads in front of your existing customers to remind them that your products and services offer key solutions to their challenges.
To have the biggest impact, and maximize your results, your ads must utilize the most effective keywords for your industry. This will likely include keywords specific to your company and those used to great success by your main competitors. You will need to dig deep and perform market research to compile a list of relevant keywords with the potential for great returns.
With this list of keywords in hand, you can optimize your paid ad and web content, to best meet the needs of your target audience. With this guide, you will learn how to select excellent keywords and use them to write high-performing Google Ads. Work through the steps below to get started.
Identify Your Target Audience
If you do not already have at least one buyer persona for use in your marketing program, now is the time to create one. A buyer persona represents your ideal customer, or the people you want to direct your Google Ads to. Your target audiences’ preferences, habits and demographic information will come into play in the selection of leading keywords for your industry.
You must get into the minds of your prospective and current customers to determine how they would access your products and services as solutions to life’s challenges. The unique perspectives of your target audience will help you create engaging ads and direct them their way using effective SEO keywords.
Plan to Use Both Short and Long Tail Keywords
Before you create your keyword list, you must explore the importance of using both short and long tail keywords. Short keyword phrases tend to have a broad scope that makes them highly competitive and increasingly expensive as a result. These two to three word phrases make up 30 percent of searches, so it makes sense to incorporate them into your digital marketing plan.
Long tail keywords have much less competition, so they cost less per click on average. Furthermore, these keywords tend to produce higher conversion rates of up to 36 percent, as they are targeted toward people nearly ready to make a purchase. With more than 70 percent of all searches based on long tail keywords, you can build an extensive list of keyword phrases that will easily boost your Google Ads impressions and engagement.
Build an Effective Keyword List
Before you can integrate search engine optimized keywords into your Google Ads, you must identify the best performing keywords for your industry and niche. Focus on identifying two to three word phrases that your customers may use to find your products and services. Once you have about 35 entries, move onto long tail keyword phrases of four words or more. Continue making your keywords more and more specific while focusing on how wording might change as your customers move through the buyer’s journey. With 100 SEO keywords in hand, you can start analyzing their potential to provide great returns on your investment.
Identify Keywords with the Biggest Profit Potential
You will need to find the keyword that have the biggest profit potential and focus on them at first. You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to review performance data for each keyword on your list and later leverage Google Analytics to help you determine how to optimize your ads. To start, go down your keyword list and record search volume data for each of your keyword phrases. If you have a brick and mortar business, look at local search volume data, otherwise focus on national results. Start with medium search volume short tail keywords and your highest search volume long tail keywords to start. You will need about three short and seven long tail keywords to start your Google AdWords marketing program.
Write Your Google Ads Using SEO Keywords
The effort you put into writing your Google Ads will help boost the success of your digital marketing efforts. You should create your base text by highlighting the product or service you want to market. Your ad copy should celebrate the things that make your products, services and company as a whole unique. Tell the world what makes your company stand out from the crowd. Give your prospective customers all the information they need to make their purchase decision right then and there.
Once you have your base copy ready, go back and look at ways you can upgrade it using your list of keywords. Focus on a single keyword per ad to start, but you can add more as you achieve success with a particular short or long tail keyword. Include the keyword in the title of your ad and at least once more in the ad copy. Link the ad to a target landing page that helps your visitors seamlessly move through the buying process. Your landing page should have the advertised deal located front and center to prevent confusion and promote conversions.
Look through your ad copy and title for typos and other errors before you deem it finalized for publication. Consider writing up several different ads for comparison purposes before settling on the best one for each keyword group. You can always add these pieces to your ad campaigns once you are sure that your keywords are performing as expected.
Determine Which Ad Groups You Will Use
With Google Ads, you have the opportunity to create ad groups for your keyword-based campaigns. You will need to arrange your ads into groups to organize your marketing efforts across the platform. You can give each ad group a name, and then place your keywords, text ads and landing pages without that entity.
You will want to use one keyword per ad group at first to optimize your digital marketing strategy. With single keyword ad groups, you can identify the keywords with the highest rate of return and focus your efforts there. Through this trial and error process, you can build high performance paid ads optimized for a particular product, service, event or other advertising opportunity.
After you have a handful of well-performing ads, you can place additional relevant keyword within the ad group to expand your reach and engagement. The additional keywords should be similar to the original keyword to keep the focus narrow. With a tight group of specific keywords, you can focus on prospective customers who are working toward the end of their buyer’s journey and are likely to make a purchase soon.
Choose Your Ad Campaigns
Once you have your ad groups in place, you can start building campaigns underneath those headings. You can choose from many different types of campaigns on this ad platform. Google offers the ability to create search network, display network, shopping, video and universal app ads. Only the search and display network ads can utilize keywords to deliver your ads to the correct audience. With search network ads, your paid advertisements appear on search engine results pages from Google and their partners. Display ads appear on websites that signed up to run ads through the Google AdWords side of the system.
The other options utilize different matching criteria to place your ads in optimal locations. Keywords do not come into play in delivering content to your target audience when running video, shopping and universal app ads. Therefore, with the new Google Ads network, you will likely have the best results by running Search Network with Display Select ad campaigns. With this option, you can use your best performing keywords to maximize the success of your paid ads.
Once you choose an ad campaign type, you can identify your marketing goals by selecting sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, and brand awareness and reach. With your goal selection, you will receive personalized recommendations and features that can help you achieve your objectives. You do have the option to create your campaigns without identifying a goal, but it is not recommended.
Compile Your Ad Copy to Create Your Ad Campaigns
Within your ad campaigns, you can create individual ads that support each of your selected keywords. Image ads can increase engagement by attracting interest in your content at first glance. Images can help boost engagement with your ads by 2.3 times to ensure your well-written ad copy can work its magic.
For best results, you can match your keyword-optimized ad copy with an eye-catching, relevant image to build image ads that will perform at their limits. You can create your ads within the Google Ads system by clicking on the campaigns tab and selecting add new. Make sure to include your image, text copy, link and action button to ensure your ads perform well on the search results pages and websites in Google’s network. Always run responsive ads to make sure your ad content automatically displays at the optimal size and appearance for the page in question.
When you set up your ads, you will need to change your matching type from the default of broad to phrase or exact. Leaving your keyword match type as broad can quickly drain your marketing budget without resulting in much more than impressions. This happens because the broad matching system shows your ad for somewhat relevant keywords that may not best represent your target audiences’ preferences nor their location in their buyer’s journey.
With a phrase match, your ads will only display when the keyword is present within the search. Exact match will only show your ads if the search is your keyword alone and exactly as written. Phrase match offers the best compromise in targeting and reach to give your ad campaigns an excellent chance at success without impacting your bottom line.
Set Up Your Ad Budget and Bid Rate
As you run your ads on Google, you will only pay when someone clicks on your ad to view the linked content. Your ad does not run every time someone searches your keyword, rather there is a bidding process. You can set your ad bid at a certain amount, and your ads will run on your keyword searches only when you are the highest bidder.
If someone outbids you for that slot, their ads will generally run instead – Unless their quality score indicates a lack of good content. The only way to get ahead without always being the highest bidder is by increasing the quality score of your ads. To find this important score, Google assesses the overall quality of your ad copy, landing page content and other factors. As your quality score increases, the amount you pay for click will likely decrease far below your max bid.
Develop an Annual Ad Schedule
Your ad schedules will determine when your ads run to best serve your target audience. Use your buyer persona to determine when your target audience spends time online and is most receptive to advertisements. With this information, you can select the days of the week and the times that your ads will run to help maximize their results. You can also strategically use ad schedules to limit your ads during busy periods and increase them during slower days or hours. Your custom schedule will run as set until you make bid adjustments after reviewing your paid ad results.
Run Your Ads and Check Their Performance
Once you have your keyword-infused Google Ads prepared in their relevant ad groups and campaigns, you can start running the ads to see how they perform. Once you choose to make your paid ads go live, you can check how they are appearing in search results.
Utilize the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to check the ad position and formatting. Your ad should perfectly meet your expectations and appeal to your target audience. By using this tool to find your ad, rather than running organic searches, you can look at your ad position without impacting your impressions. Work within the tool to ensure that you always have accurate analytics available for the review of your keyword and overall ad campaign performance.
Find Your Most Effective Keyword Groups
If your ads are not performing as expected and converting visits into sales, then your ad campaigns may start to drain money from your company. You must assess the performance of your Google Ads using the integrated analytic tools to ensure you only run high performance advertisements. One of the most telling key performance indicators for paid ads is the conversion rate. If you have a shopping cart attached to your website, you can easily track conversion rates with a tracking code. This code will automatically let you know when a click converts into a sale to help with the assessment of your ad success.
You should also look at click through rate and impressions to see how often your target audience interacts with your ads and just generally sees them on the page, respectively. The click through rate can also help improve your quality score as users show trust in your ads and brand in general. With a look at the analytics data, you can identify the keywords that are underperforming and eliminate them from your Google Ads campaigns. Only focus on the keywords that offer the greatest returns until you are happy enough with your marketing success to branch out further.
Split Test Your Ads for Additional Optimization Opportunities
Once you have a few well-performing ads, you can look for additional optimization opportunities with split testing. This testing process allows you to make small variations to your ad copy or format, and then see how the changes would perform. You may alter your keywords, improve your call to action or make small changes to your ad text or image to try to improve your results. Remember to only make a single change at a time to determine what works the best. Otherwise, your testing results could be compromised by your inability to determine which change had the greatest impact.
Start Your Journey Toward Success by Using SEO Keywords in Your Google Ads
With the right SEO keywords integrated into your Google Ads, you can achieve your marketing goals without the fanfare. The keywords will quietly do the legwork for you in delivering content to your target audience, as you focus on creating the ad copy that will boost your conversion rates. With an understanding that search algorithms are always changing, you can stay on your toes by optimizing your content with the best performing keywords in your industry. Get started today to begin achieving great success in all your digital marketing efforts.
Key Takeaways
Keywords can help maximize the performance of your Google Ads
You must use keywords that support your customer preferences and needs
Search Network with Display Select ad campaigns are your best bet for SEO-driven ads
Single keyword ad groups offer measurable results for future improvement opportunities
Always switch from broad keyword matching to phrase or exact match
Split testing can help you find additional ways to optimize your content