For as long as I can remember, keyword research has been an intimidating task for anybody I’ve worked with. After all, it’s the most important part of an Internet Marketing strategy-finding the words and phrases searchers use when they look for products and services. When starting a campaign, I spend at least 20-30 hours researching targeted keywords, so you can understand my frustration when I see websites that don’t do their homework. You can always tell when a website is poorly thought out when their bounce rate (rate of departure due to irrelevant data) is through the roof.
I was performing keyword research yesterday evening-which I always do on Sundays, I find that it’s a neutral day to work-and while doing so, I found an outstanding method to expand your keyword inventory: spy on your competition’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. I’ve used this method in the past for isolated situations, but I’ve never used it as part of my methodology for finding profitable niches-until now.
If you think about it, your competition would not be bidding $5-$10 per click on specific keywords if they did not see a return on investment. These words should be at the top of your list for writing content and expanding your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC campaigns. Targeting these keywords first is a smart idea because they have been proven by industry competitors to be profitable.
I recommend Googling your most relevant keyword. From that, generate a list of the top 100 keywords from each advertiser on Google AdWords. Do this over a five day period to cancel out advertisers who aren’t relevant and are short term. After a week, you should have over 500 words, their average CPC, and their maximum CPC. Narrow those keywords down to the top 250 words with the highest maximum CPC and remove the keywords that haven’t yielded a significant amount of daily traffic.
This isn’t to say you should throw out traditional keyword research. Services like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker should definitely be used in conjunction with this method. The most important thing is to organize these keywords into as many groups as possible and sort them by the highest amount of searches. These groups should give you ideas for writing targeted content. The individual keywords should suggest terms that need be included within each article.
If spying on your competition is something that interests you, there are plenty of tools on that market that use the Google AdWords API to display this information. A few of these tools include: SpyFu, PPC Web Spy, and Keyword Spy. I personally subscribe to PPC Web Spy and have been very happy with the functionality and ease of use. Having the right tools will save you hours of extra work and make the mind-numbing job much more enjoyable.
** Just a clarification, when I use the phrase “spy on your competition”, it is not intended for unethical behavior. The tools I use only provide publically available information. **
