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. **

Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targeted and in a niche market-otherwise you’re probably wasting your money. Here are a few steps you need to take to help optimize a website for PPC:

• Remove advertising from your website. Nothing makes a customer want to leave more than visiting a website full of ads. Advertising also encourages your users to click on your ads and leave your website.
• Case studies show that single column websites perform better for PPC websites. Perhaps you’ve seen these “squeeze” pages before, where all of the content on a website is incorporated into one large page? Believe it or not, this simplistic design performs very well and is one of the most effective ways to make a sale.
• Make your sales pitch extremely targeted and do not sway from the point you’re trying to make.
• Include a call to action and repeat that call to action throughout the page. This means if your call to action is to have the user sign up for your newsletter, mention it several times throughout your copy.
• Most of the time, your headline is the only thing your visitor reads before they exit your website. Make sure that your headline matches exactly what existed in your advertisement.
• Finally you need to use multivariate testing. This means that you test several different versions of a web page and see which one performs better. You should test the copy of the following items of your web page:
  • Headline
  • Calls to Action
  • Caption Copy
  • Graphical Elements
  • Body Copy

I cannot stress enough about relevancy and how important it is to the success of your online business. Here is my formula for success and it has worked for so many. Just remember the following:

Success = The Search Query + The Advertisement +

The Headline of Website + The Copy

All of the above should match up completely in relevancy. If a person types in “how to design a website” into Google, they should see an advertisement that reads “how to design a website” and then the web page he clicks should read somewhere in the headline “how to design a website”. The copy of the web page should contain everything about your “how to design a website” product. This is where most people run into problems with PPC advertising. The secret is to keep everything as relevant as possible.