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Today’s post is by Brad Geddes, founder of Certified Knowledge and well-known expert and speaker in SEO, PPC, social, display, and affiliate marketing. Learn more about Brad here.
How important is keyword strategy to your PPC campaigns?
It’s crucial! Keywords are the basis of any campaign, but use them to their full potential and they become a powerful weapon in your search marketing arsenal. Keyword strategy drives the success of your campaign and affects impression volume, Quality Score and the cost you'll pay for each click. If there's only one place you can afford to focus your efforts, it's here.
Next week, on Tuesday, September 9, three PPC power users – Jaclyn Jordan, an experienced PPC account manager from WordStream, competitive intelligence expert Mike Roberts from SpyFu, and myself – will each share our unique approaches to keyword strategy in an exclusive webinar: Keyword Strategies for Everyone From PPC Power Users.
Why You Need Smarter Keyword Strategies
It's a common refrain among marketers: AdWords is just too complicated. Even those who work in it every day have trouble keeping up with the rapid-fire changes within the platform.
For example, a number of changes over the last two years have us asking ourselves repeatedly, "Is phrase match dead?" The most recent change was Google's redefining of the exact and phrase match types to include close variant matching, meaning even “exact” and “phrase” match keywords will now trigger ads for misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, and other “close enough” matches.
In many accounts, modified broad is equal to or better than phrase match, allowing your ads to trigger on close variations of your keyword that don’t include the exact phrase. Modified broad gives you greater control than broad match alone, as it doesn't trigger on synonyms or related searches, yet it's not as restrictive as phrase match. It's a happy medium for many.
So is it worth keeping a ton of extra words to manage in your account? Maybe, if you have the time. If you're a control freak, absolutely keep them all in there.
On the other hand, if you're short on time and looking to simplify your account management, modified broad might be a better option for you. Unless you're in a situation where exact verbiage matters (e.g., a “Cleveland driver” is a golf club, while “driver Cleveland” could be a transportation-related search query), there may be no measurable benefit to managing extra keywords in phrase.
If you are in that situation, where Google is taking away your exact match targeting, what do you do?
Creative hacks to work around the death of exact and phrase match are just one of the topics we'll be diving into next Tuesday. We're also making sure participants leave with:
- A simplified approach to PPC strategy, to save time and manage their accounts more effectively.
- WordStream's secret formula for smarter keyword prioritization.
- Unorthodox ways to use Google's Keyword Planner and competitive intelligence tools.
Join me alongside WordStream’s Jaclyn Jordan from and SpyFu’s Mike Roberts as we share everything from keyword basics to advanced keyword tactics from the pros. Register now.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.