7 Google Ads Search Keyword Targeting Best Practices

what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today I'll be going through seven helpful keyword targeting tips in Google Ads so it's relatively specific to search campaigns so I have a search campaign open here I'm gonna get right in the tutorial I use this campaign solely to create these videos but I am gonna be creating a free Google Ads course hopefully this month so hopefully I'll have everything done this month and publish to my youtube channel so we're gonna get started here and number one is going to be to limit your search campaigns to search Network and search partners only so when you come in here to create a new campaign so you're in your Google Ads account and let's just say you're trying to drive sales and you're using a search campaign to do it you're using website visits and we'll just say we're gonna click on continue here so you come in you're gonna hang your campaign and one of the first things you're gonna see here is networks and it's automatically gonna opt you into the Display Network keywords perform much differently on the Google Display Network than they do on the search Network and with Google search partners so what I would highly recommend doing for every search campaign is make sure you do not include the Google Display Network just run your search campaigns on the search Network and include Google search partners Seska me number one it's a very basic tip but it's something that a lot of new advertisers don't realize and if I ever look at accounts that new advertisers have created if they haven't created accounts before a lot of times they include this because you're automatically opted in to the Display Network when you do create your search campaigns so just keep your campaigns on the search Network and include Google search partners because that's gonna make sure that your ads are just reaching people who are searching keywords in search engines rather than people who are browsing different web sites and maybe different YouTube videos and channels you want to make sure that you're just reaching people as they search so that's gonna be number one now number two is gonna be to group keywords together in different ad groups to make sure that you can create relevant ads for those keywords and drive people to very targeted landing pages so if we open our search campaign here I only have a few ad groups in this search campaign but if we scroll down you can see the different ad groups have my keywords grouped together by the theme so you can see farmhouse cabinets farmhouse dining tables shelves sinks and even down here copper sinks and stained the steel farmhouse sinks so you want to make sure that you group your keywords together based on the types of landing pages where you're gonna be sending traffic so if I know someone's searching specifically for farmhouse copper sinks and I come into my website over here you can see I have a farmhouse sinks shop page with all these different categories rather than sending people directly to this page I can make sure I'm sending people to this copper farmhouse sinks page if I scroll down a little bit more you can see I can make sure I'm sending people to my stainless steel farmhouse sinks page if I come back over here to add groups I can send people who are searching specifically for farmhouse sinks I can just send them to that broad page they can find the one that they're looking for what if people are searching for copper sinks stainless steel sinks I can make sure that I'm sending them to the best possible landing pages and I can make sure that my ads match the actual keywords that they're searching now number three is going to be to avoid broad match keywords without a modifier so if I come in here to farmhouse cabinets for example and we're looking at the keywords that we're targeting so you can see I was targeting the exact match version of this keyword and I was targeting the modified broad match version of this keyword or broad match modifier version so if we come in here and we're adding new keywords you can see there's some different keyword match types down here there's broad match where you just enter the keyword with no quotes no brackets no plus sign so really no modifiers at all there's phrase match so that you would put your keywords in quotes and there's exact match where you would put your keywords in brackets if I'm targeting the keyword farmhouse cabinets I never want to come in here and type in farmhouse cabinets I want to make sure I'm including modifiers so what you want to do is make sure you're including these plus signs here is that gonna make sure that people are actually typing in these words or words that are very similar to them that have the same user intent rather than just keeping things very broad so use modifier broad match keywords rather than using broad match keywords all together if you're coming in here and you have all your ad groups and you're targeting keywords like farmhouse cabinets and we have a separate ad group let's say and you're doing farmhouse shelves and then you have another ad group with farmhouse sinks you're gonna have a very broad search terms that might not be all that relevant for the keywords that you're trying to target so it can be useful for really high budget campaigns but it's gonna make organizing your campaigns and organizing your ad groups much more difficult so I'd highly recommend making sure that you're targeting these broad match modifier keywords if you want to keep things a little bit broader then that's what you want to target you can also target phrase match or exact match keywords I would recommend just choosing one of the three different keyword targeting options when you're creating your ad groups I used to have it set up so I would target these broad match modifier keywords and then I'll also target the exact match version of it in each individual ad group but the way I do it now is a little bit different and that's gonna bring me into number four if you're trying to expand your campaigns a little bit and you want to target a little bit more broader keywords and you want to include synonyms and different types of things so for example if I want to target farmhouse cabinets and I don't mind if someone goes to Google and types in something like so I'll get rid of this for now and let's say someone types in rustic cabinets for sale so I consider rustic cabinets to be very similar to farmhouse cabinets I consider this word to be a synonym when it comes to home and garden so if someone types in rustic cabin is for sale if I'm targeting just this broad match modifier keyword then my ads might actually show for this keyword now the other thing I can do is just target the exact match version here so we'd get rid of this broad match modifier and then you would make sure that your ads are not showing it all for when people do type in something like rustic cabinets for sale so if you're trying to keep things more narrow and really more targeted then I would recommend using the phrase match or exact match version of the keywords so you would use this or you would use farmhouse cabinets as you're setting up your ad groups otherwise if you want things to be more broad you want to expand your campaigns you want a little bit more search volume and you want to match for some of these different synonym keywords then what you would do is just come here and you would target farmhouse cabinets because ultimately what Google's gonna do is look at user intent and look at the keyword that you're targeting and say okay this person is targeting farmhouse cabinets someone just typed in rustic cabinets for sale we think that this is gonna be a good match because it's going to be very similar to this person is looking for and if you just look over here to the right hand side you can see rustic farmhouse decor is one of the main keywords that comes up based on my website and based on the keywords that I'm targeting so you can see rustic is really just a synonym of farmhouse so if someone types in this keyword I don't have a problem with my ad showing for it because when they go to my website they're gonna see rustic cabinets for sale so that's really how you want to look at it so number four is broad match modifier keywords specifically for expansion for testing so you can test some different keywords that people are typing in and for larger budgets if you have a smaller budget you want things to be a little bit more narrow then you might want to use exact match or phrase match keywords however the one downside to those is it could increase your costs a little bit because you're not expanding the amount of keywords that you're gonna target and the amount of search terms that your ads are gonna show for so that's gonna be number four now next is gonna be number five and number five is don't worry about misspellings or key word order or anything like that or plurals so if someone comes in here let's say you're targeting a keyword farmhouse cabinet so we'll keep the same exact example we've been using and we're gonna come down here a little bit and let's just say for example someone goes into Google and they type in the keyword and they do they miss the are here so they do fam house cabinets you don't need to target this keyword Google is gonna understand that this person is looking for farmhouse cabinets so you will match with that search term by just targeting this keyword here same thing if someone does cabinets farmhouse style so if someone types in something like this into Google it'll still match your keywords so don't worry about the order of keywords and this goes the same for exact match keywords as well so even if you're just targeting something like farmhouse cabinets you don't need to worry if someone types in a keyword just like farmhouse cabinet so this will still match for this keyword and the same thing with misspellings with plurals if someone comes in here and does farmhouse cabinets they enter apostrophes or anything like that you don't need to target all these separate keywords so don't worry about misspellings don't worry about keyword order and don't worry about plurals just target the keywords that you're targeting so if you're targeting farmhouse cabinets you don't need to enter ten different variations to make sure that any time someone misspells the keyword or someone orders the awards a little bit differently you're still gonna show with your advertisements in the Google search results even if someone types in something a little bit different than the way you've targeted your keyword Google again looks at intent they're looking at what keyword this person is typing in and they understand some of the most common misspellings that people do so you might find some misspellings in your search terms if people commonly misspelled your terms however you don't really need to worry about it you don't need to target those keywords separately it's still gonna be handled when you're targeting your keywords whether it's exact match phrase match or broad match modifier keywords so that's gonna be number five okay so now we're gonna get out of this for now and come into number six so number six is gonna be to understand so if we click on our search campaign here and we come into our search terms report understand the importance of negative keywords and building negative keyword lists for your campaigns so if we come into the search terms report here we're gonna be able to see the search terms so these are what people are actually typing it and farmhouse sink sinks copper so you can see some of these top search terms here that people are typing in and you want to make sure that you're adjusting your campaign adjusting your ad groups and making sure that your campaign is really organized and that you're not targeting keywords that are irrelevant for your business so something like rustic farmhouse dining table very relevant now if we come down here to farmhouse cabinets and you see farmhouse china cabinet I might say okay maybe I can create a page on my website specifically for farmhouse china cabinets farmhouse corner cabinets so I can make sure that as people do type in the keywords that I'm trying to target I can send them to the best landing pages I can make sure that my ads are as relevant as possible for those different searches now when it comes to the farmhouse sinks you're gonna see things like farm space house inks again this is a closed variant so a misspelling the orders a little bit different someone puts a space between farmhouse sinks you don't need to target those keywords separately so someone does farm sinks again it's a closed variant so I don't need to type in even farmhouse or farm sink separately it's still gonna be covered by the keywords that I'm targeting but these are gonna be fine I don't need to create separate ad groups for this but some of these other ones I might be able to create a better user experience for my customers and ultimately that's going to help Mike the rate which is gonna help my campaign performance over time so if we look at some of these rows here we look at the top 50 keywords we'll look by impressions you can look by cost you can see which search terms are driving the most conversions for your business and really put your budget towards those search terms so we keep scrolling down here a little bit and now as we get down here you're gonna see something like inexpensive copper farmhouse apron sinks with garbage disposal drain so maybe what I want is I don't want inexpensive at all in my search advertising campaign with Google Ads so if I click here what I can do is add is a negative keyword so I'll add a negative keyword rather than adding this specific keyword here I can just say ok to the campaign level I don't want people who are typing in the word inexpensive so if anybody types in inexpensive I can also add other keywords like cheap or free I can make sure that I'm really targeting people who are looking for the high quality options that I have on my website and make sure them not trying to find people who are just bargain hunters who might be looking for the lowest possible price who might just be comparison shopping right now I want to reach people who aren't comparison shopping who know they want a copper farmhouse sink they come to my website they see this election and hopefully buy one so if I click on save here now I'm gonna add this new negative keyword so using your search terms report using negative keywords is really important for campaign success and if we keep scrolling down here and I look at some of these other options you can see Better Homes and Gardens farmhouse cabinet so I want to make sure that I have a Better Homes and Gardens farmhouse cabinet on my website and what I might want to do again is separate that out into a separate ad group and send people specifically to a landing page for all the cabinet's on my website that are from better home and gardens so you can also come in here and remove brand names so I can just say add as a negative keyword and just say you know what if someone's looking specifically for Better Homes and Gardens then I'll come here add that as a phrase match negative keyword so it could be someone searching for IKEA farmhouse cabinets or some different brand names like that I can just come in here and add IKEA as a negative keyword and make sure that my ads aren't showing when people are looking for specific brands especially if I don't have them on my website it's the same thing when people are looking for eBay or Amazon or Craigslist or any of these different things that people might type in depending on what their for if your website isn't set up to handle that person search you might just want to remove those search terms altogether now you can wait for more data and see if those search terms are still driving conversions and if they are then you don't have to remove them yet but I generally remove brand names and I'll just take Better Homes and Gardens remove it for my campaign and that's not gonna be targeting it specifically and making sure that people are going to see those types of products on the landing pages where I'm sending traffic to so I'll take this I'll remove this keyword altogether and then we can make sure that we're not targeting at it anymore so number six make sure that you're using your search terms report here so if you come to keywords you have your search keywords your negative keywords and your search terms report use the search terms report to find negative keyword ideas and continuously add negative keywords and when you're adding negative keywords there's a couple different options you can do if we click Add as negative keyword here you can add exact match negative keywords otherwise what you can do is add phrase match negative keywords so I can do better Better Homes and Gardens so I can take this negative keyword as a phrase match type and then the other thing you can do is broad match negative keywords usually I'll only do single words for broad match negative keywords so if I just don't want the word gardens in my search campaign if I don't want the word IKEA in my search campaign then I'll just add it as a broad match negative keyword so there are different negative keyword match types so you should keep that in mind as you are targeting keywords in Google Ads now last but not least when you're targeting search keywords you might not know which what usage should set for your max CPC so if you have enhanced CPC bid strategy here I come down I'm targeting some of these different keywords you might see below first page bid and a lot of times they're not showing because I have a low ad rank and I probably have a low quality score for a lot of these keywords because I haven't really optimized this campaign that well so if you're seeing some really high bids here the first thing you want to do is optimize for your quality score so create multiple relevant ads in each ad group make sure that you're driving people to the best landing pages however if you're just looking for some different ideas for max CPC as you setup your campaign you don't know how much advertisers are bidding this is where the keyword planner comes in handy so as you're creating your campaign you come to tools and settings here you're setting up your bids come to planning and go to keyword planner now we're gonna open the keyword planner here and what you want to do is click on discover new keywords so let's just say I'm doing farmhouse decor farmhouse sinks farm house cabinets and we'll just use some of these different examples here so you can enter all the different keywords that you're interested in that you want to target for your search campaign and we click on get results and you can see we come down here you're gonna see some of these different keywords that we're targeting what Google is gonna give you is the low range for the top of page bid so the lower amount that some advertisers are bidding for this keyword to reach that top of page and then some of the higher ranges so farmhouse cabinet advertisers are bidding as low as 22 cents all the way up to 2 dollars and 40 cents so if you're not sure what you should set it at what you might want to do is just take the take a middle number maybe you just want to take a little bit of a lower number so if I take 2 dollars and 40 cents maybe I don't want to do is start with farmhouse cabinets and I'm just gonna target this keyword and maybe I want to come in here and I just want to set my bid for farmhouse cabinets we'll say we'll set it at $1 20 so that way I'm setting a competitive bid as they enter the ad auction it's probably gonna be a lower bid I'm not gonna be have that top of page bid all that often but as I opt amaizing and improve my quality score I can make sure that my ads are actually showing in the search results so we come back over here to keyword ideas we have farm sink farmhouse sink and you can see advertisers are bidding up to 2 dollars and 50 cents for some of these keywords and at the low range it's around 90 cents so I want to show up at all for this keyword I probably have to bid at least a dollar 50 so we're gonna come over to search keywords we have farmhouse things here and we'll come in here to adjust our bid we'll set a manual bid and we'll bid at least a dollar 50 and it's gonna be similar for things like stainless steel farmhouse sinks farmhouse copper sinks so maybe for these two I'll click on both of them we can click on edit up here at the top change max CPC bids and we'll set new bids you can also raise your bids the first page CPC raise bids to top of page CPC so a couple options that you have you can also increase bids by a percentage with an upper bid limit to make sure you're not bidding over a certain amount or decrease bids by a percent percentage same thing lower bid limit so I'll set new bid well to say will bid $1 25 on these keywords click on apply then you can always see the type of volume that you're getting see how many impressions you're getting so you can see my impressions my clicks click-through rate my costs over here so you really want to bid as low as possible to drive the best targeted traffic to your website that's really your goal over time now a big thing is gonna be your quality score and again your quality score is going to be based on your click-through rate so a higher click-through rate is always better it's gonna be based on your add relevance your ads and extensions and your landing page experience so when someone types in farmhouse dining tables I need to show them an ad that's related to their search term and send them to a landing page it's gonna be very relevant to what they're looking for so that's gonna be number seven is to use the Google Keyword planner and look at some of the bids here to come up with bid ideas for the keywords that you're targeting and if we come back over here to Google Ads you're also gonna see things like this below first page bid you can always just click here and set it to the first page of search results to make sure that your ads are actually showing up and then hopefully decrease those bids over time I generally just keep them as low as possible when I'm first starting out with my campaign and try to get my quality scores as high as possible so that way I can really bid lower over the course of time I'm not spending a ton of money in the beginning as I'm testing and as I'm learning about my campaign because it's ultimately gonna drive down my historical conversion rate if I'm spending more money on each individual click so it's really kind of a push and pull and trying to find what's gonna give you the best results as you create your campaign and as you target keywords so those are my seven tips is some different things to keep in mind so again limit your search campaigns to search Network and search partners do not run your search campaigns on the Display Network use broad match modifier keywords to expand and test and kind of get more search volume from your campaigns and use exact match keywords if you want to keep things more targeted and that's relevant as possible you don't want to show up for synonyms you don't want to show up for keywords that might not be related to what you're targeting so exact match keywords would come in handy for that so if you have lower budgets you might want to use exact match keywords unless you are using broad match modifier keywords you want to make sure that you're looking at your search terms regularly and adding keywords all the time and again you don't have to worry about misspellings or any of those types of things Google will handle all of that for you one of the best tips again that I give can give you is as you're creating your ad groups make sure that you group your keywords together as best as possible so your landing pages are really relevant you're sending people to the best possible landing pages based on what they're searching for and the more organized you can create your campaign the lower you can bid over time because Google will reward you with a higher quality score now the last thing I want to go through is in keyword matching options broad match is the default match type so if you don't put any modifiers you just type a keyword in you click on enter you're gonna be targeting broad match keywords if we scroll down here we're gonna see some different examples of when your ads would show for the four different keyword match types broad match broad match modifier phrase match an exact match so for broad match let's say you're targeting the keyword women's hats so your ad might show up for keywords like women's clothing so not targeted at all women's scarves so I would say all of these should be in separate ad groups so why I never target broad match keywords if we keep scrolling down you're gonna see broad match modifier so for this one you put a plus sign in front of the keyword you're targeting the keyword women's hats here so you're gonna see this would show for things like women's scarves and hats so at least someone is typing in hats here it also will show things for hats for stylish ladies so it's gonna take ladies and say anybody who's typing in the keyword hats for stylish ladies are looking for women's hats so that's why I like broad match modifier keywords because it's gonna expand the keywords that you're targeting a little bit but it's also gonna keep things very targeted so you don't have to worry about your ad groups being irrelevant to what people are searching which is gonna happen constantly if you're using broad match keywords keep scrolling down you're gonna see phrase match keywords I don't generally use phrase matches often but you're gonna see things here women's hats so it'll show ladies hats on sale buy hats for women blue women's hats so a little bit more targeted than broad match modifier but again I would just recommend either using a broad match modifier or if you want things to be as targeted as possible using exact match keywords so with this you're gonna put brackets around the keyword you're gonna see women's hats and it's only gonna show for really targeted keywords women's hats ladies hats hats for women hats women so you're gonna keep things as targeted as possible with exact match keywords and with broad match modifier keywords you can expand your campaigns a little bit but again the biggest tips I can give you is never use broad match keywords and make sure your search campaigns are only running on the search Network and to search partners and if you start with some of those different tips and you start organizing your campaigns into different ad groups you really start to improve your landing pages and your advertisements over time you're gonna start getting what you want out of your campaigns which is gonna be conversions in the form of sales leads or whatever your key performance indicators are so these are some different keyword targeting tips hopefully you learn more about targeting search keywords with your Google Ads campaigns thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC youtube channel

Channel: Surfside PPC

Views: 9,931

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: google ads, google adwords, google ads keywords, google adwords keywords, google ads keyword match types, google keyword targeting, search keywords, google ads search keywords, google adwords search keywords, how do keywords work in adwords, keyword targeting adwords, keyword targeting google ads, search network keywords

Id: 4CivQKIPm2M

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019