Keywords are the lifeblood of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns. If you don’t have a strong list of keywords, then you are going to lose quality traffic. Don’t just rely on the keyword tools within the search engines for your keyword research. Here are some ways to generate keywords to try in your campaigns:

Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.

Think from your customer’s perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry.

Nichebot.com. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It’s free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to “Overture” to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo. But don’t overlook the “Word Tracker” option, which will generate a lot of keyword data. The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword (“KEI” is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).

You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site.

If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords.

Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher’s buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle.

And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unrulely number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you’re going to run ads for “gardening”, you might as well run them for “flower gardening”, “spring garden”, and “planting”. Yahoo and MSN have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.

If you would like some help generating keywords and managing your pay-per-click campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.