How To Establish Your Targeted Keyword Phrase for PPC

by Lawrence Roth, 3/23/2004

"Targeted Keyword Phrase" is one of the primary buzzwords (buzz-phrases); we e-commerce entrepreneurs all hear and read about. However, it is easier said then done. If the keywords are too general, your website will be hit with a lot of traffic you don't want or need, resulting in only a few or no buys. If the keywords are too narrow, you might not get enough traffic, resulting in only a few or no buys.

Using a PPC (Pay Per Click) site like Google Adwords or Overture can result in a high expense with few or no sales for general words. For example, my Website Rothline.com is an online catalog for computer and video games and pc software. When the site was started, we used the keywords, "video games," "computer games" and "pc software." We got a lot of traffic via Google Adwords and Overture. But only a few sales. The expense for the PPC was higher than the profit for those sales.

So we went back to the drawing board and established a new list of keywords. This is the process that we currently use: First, we use the following websites to search with keywords and assess the results:

By using a general keyword like "video games" we use the Google Adwords Keyword Search to create a list of more specific keywords and similar keywords. Then from those lists we use the Overture Keyword Search to determine how many times a keyword was searched in a previous month.

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