- The majority of your advertising will use keywords

as the primary method for attracting customers.

And keywords are words or phrases

that are used to match your ads

with the terms people are searching for.

These will be the true foundation of your campaigns.

So selecting high-quality, relevant keywords

for your campaigns is critical.

Now, a big mistake that you'll want to avoid

is making the assumption that keywords

that mean roughly the same thing will perform the same.

Let's say you're in the pre-owned vehicle business.

This might be an industry term

but if you're selling to a typical consumer,

well, they're not using that language.

They'll be searching for used cars.

And that keyword pre-owned vehicles

is not the same keyword as used cars.

There are about 600 times the number of searches

on the term used cars over pre-owned vehicles.

So there is a huge advantage to using the language

that your customers are already using.

The airline industry is another great example.

They might reference low fares in their marketing language,

but in reality, customers are talking about

discounted flights or cheap flights.

So as you go about researching keywords, you want to be sure

that you're speaking the language of your customer.

Now, the best advertising is specific.

So instead of pushing our message to the masses,

we want to push our ads out to those very specific people

that we know are interested in what we have to offer.

And if we know that our personas are say, teenagers

using slang or jargon, then we'd need to focus

on using slang or jargon in our keywords.

Now, to arrive at great keywords

the first step is to think like your customer,

imagine what they're searching for.

These are the terms that you're going to use.

Think of specific search words

for each category of product or service

that you have available and use personas

to get in your customer's head.

Remember, you want to know how they're thinking

about that product or service.

Now, the second tip is to organize by theme,

group all of your keywords into tightly connected themes.

And as you look at that list of themes,

see if you can break them up into sub-themes.

And again, the more thematic, the more grouped things are,

the better results that you'll have.

So if you have an ad group for say men's boots,

you would want to get more granular

and create themed keywords,

such as men's rain boots, men's work boots,

men's motorcycle boots, men's fashion boots, and so on.

In fact, you might even find yourself grouping those

into their own deeper themes.

And finally be specific, a generalized keyword

is going to get you irrelevant matches.

Boots would be a bad keyword in general

because it has no context.

People that are typing in boots

might be looking for boots for themselves,

for their dog, or Boots the pharmacy in the UK.

So it's better to be specific

and get about five to 20 keywords per ad group.

And most importantly, just take your time.

Keywords are one of the most important elements

in your Google ads process.

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