Most pay-per-click campaigns are built around a wide keyword list and / or a deep keyword list. This article will discuss a few additional ways to choose keywords.

Deep Keyword list

A deep keyword is basically a list of search terms which include your word or search term. You would select “phrase match” in Google when creating your keyword list. For example if you sell “keyword research” then your deep list would include “keyword research software”, “keyword research tools” etc….

Wide Keyword List

A Wide list covers a much broader range of search terms. You would include synonyms and related phrases. The advantage is you get to cover a broader audience for your product. For example people may search for “how to choose good keywords” or “find keywords”.

Google Keyword Tool

Google’s Keyword tool returns both a deep keyword list and wide keyword list which it considers related to your search term. This is a good place to start because you know that Google considers these are relevant.

However here are some more ways to choose a keyword list…

Spying on your competition

Now if you have run a PPC campaign before you will know it can take a long time to optimize a new PPC campaign. You need to first research your keywords, and then test them until you refine your list to include only high-converting search terms which are going to give you a good return on ad spend.

What if you could leverage the work of your competitors?

There are a couple of good PPC tools which I use which allow you to do this.

The first PPC Tool is essentially a plugin for Firefox and it is FREE and it is called PPC Web Spy. After installing the plugin when you restart Firefox it shows a button you can click under each PPC ad.

Then when you click on the “Keyword” button you get a list of results which shows exactly which keywords that advertiser is bidding on, together with the Cost per click, and their daily spend.

The free version however limits you to 10 keywords in random order but the paid version actually returns up to 100 words in order of importance.

The second is Ad Spy Pro. This tool lets you enter a list of keywords which you want to track and the amount of time you want to track them for, and it goes out to the web and pulls back information on PPC campaigns which are running for those ads as well as whether they are affiliate links or not. The importance of tracking these ads over time is because if a certain ad appears time and time again, the likelihood is that it is converting well for the advertiser.

So by using these tools you can actually leverage the work of others to quickly come up with a targeted keyword list that will probably give you good conversions… so long as you have optimized your landing pages to convert well!