When to Narrow and Broaden Your Keyword Usage
Last month we discussed the difference between popular and profitable keywords. Today, we want to propose a general rule of thumb that will help keep your different keyword strategies scalable:
Narrow your keywords for paid searches...
When your company is paying money for each directed click you receive, you don't want clicks that don't bring you:
- Paying customers,
- Interested viewers, or
- Valuable audience members
As such, you want to pay for highly specific keywords. Being extremely targeted is crucial when you have a niche product or geographical constraints. However, sometimes it's beneficial to experiment with more generalized keywords. More generalized keywords means you'll face more competition and have more traffic that doesn't convert into paying customers, but an upsurge in traffic might get you profitable attention or reveal a new market you hadn't considered.
Remember, though, to regularly prune your keywords to get rid of the ones that bring you into search results you don't care about.
...and expand your keywords for content.
Search engines are getting smarter and smarter about analyzing your website to see if it's both credible and relevant. That means you need to have a lot of high-quality content that explores keywords in a natural, informative manner. Many businesses have an online blog for precisely this purpose. Promotional content about your services/products and a long 'About Us' page generally isn’t enough anymore. Instead, providing expert answers makes potential customers trust you more. When writing content, cover all your core keywords and then branch out to indirect subject matters.
We recently featured a blog discussing how to use Google’s Keyword Planner to Plan Your Website Content. Not that you’ve started learning about successful keywords in your ad campaign, use our article to help plan better content. If you need help with your Google AdWords ads or your online content, reach out to us to learn more about our services!
