How to add keywords

Google Search ads can be a little more on the expensive side thanks to the rising popularity of cost per click. If you are trying to boost your campaigns’ performance without having to throw excessive money at the cause, sink your teeth into Google Ads keywords.

For highly competitive interests, such as law and luxury goods, certain keywords can cost over $100 for 1 single click. While the average cost per click is around $1.50. Do you see where we are going with this? Targeting the right keywords for your business is more important than ever.

Before we jump into how to add keywords using the Google Ads keyword planner, let’s take it back to some basic tips to achieve the best success for your business.

Keyword selection is about adding both low and high-volume keywords relevant to your product or business. When selecting wide-ranging keywords that generate thousands of monthly searches, your clicks may be higher however the other end of this is the number of users who aren’t actually going to convert on your website. The broader the keyword, the more likely a high rate of untargeted traffic. On the other hand, a keyword with a smaller reach may only direct under 20 visitors to your site a month, even if they are all people who will definitely convert. For keywords, we want to balance both of the above users – reach and conversion.

Hot tip: take metrics like visits, search volume, clicks and impressions with a grain of salt. a commercial with 1000 clicks is barely profitable if it converts further.

When selecting your keywords and SEO, the intent of these search terms is incredibly important. what’s search intent? put simply, it’s the intent behind a user’s search. What does the user need or want? as an example, users who seek for terms like “same day clothing alterations near me” are trying to find an answer and can presumably convert, whether or not the content isn’t super impressive.

Whereas, a user who searches “best pottery classes” are often wanting to discover a few options, read reviews and consider their choices. So, as a business, bidding on keywords like this won’t convert in the short term or return a healthy return on investment. Making sure your intent is part of your keywords is imperative to your business strategy and budget.

Similarly, neglecting to feature negative keywords may also damage your business performance. What are negative keywords? these are the keywords you don’t want your ads to display for. By using negative keywords, your business can stop wasting money on terms that won’t convert.

Now that we’ve got the fundamentals nailed, let’s jump into a way to use the Google Ads Keyword Planner for your business

If you are attempting to find keywords using a general phrase to find related terms or using a website or a broad category then select the left-hand side option, Discover new keywords.

If you want to get metrics and forecast for a list of keywords, then select the right-hand side option to do this.

If you’re just getting started then we’ll select option one, Discover new keywords.

Begin entering your service or products descriptions. This may generate some basic ideas of keywords that are niche to your audience. You also have the choice to start by entering a relevant landing page or website at this point.

It’s best to not write a sentence or detailed paragraph. Instead summarise your business in 1-3 direct words only. See below example:

As you can see, the dashboard is comprehensive. The results will show you:

The keywords that relate to what you entered will display by the most to least relevant alongside three columns:

These columns now allow businesses to base their bidding on realistic behaviour for the keywords they choose.

Next you can add features to assist you in sorting keywords that do not fit your business goals or budgets. You can do this based on bidding, volume, competition and more

You can also move to the right-hand side of the results, and choose to include different keywords from different categories in the list by selecting Refine Keywords. This helps business categorise and single out valuable keywords.

For example; if your business offers pottery classes, but only on weekends, you could then focus on related keywords from those two segments. This will help your business simplify the number of prospective keywords to a much more relevant amount.

While you are searching for new keywords, you will want to save time and exclude keywords that may already be in use in your campaigns. As mentioned above, this data will display in the Accounts column. If a keyword is already in use, you will want to filter this word out. Why? You wouldn’t want to be bidding against yourself!

To exclude these, simply click the Add Filter link on the left-hand side of the results page and search for Account. You can then choose the Exclude Keywords in my Account option. This will now filter out all keywords that are being used in your other campaigns.

Hot tip: this feature will not exclude if a keyword has been used on a paused campaign, so if you have tested in the past, it’s best to remove any inactive keywords from these paused campaigns.

Finally, how to add negative keywords. Yes- these are just as important. These will help you remove results that don’t apply to your business. To add these keywords, begin by checking irrelevant keywords in your list and selecting the More link.

You can then multiple negative keywords at once and define even further to specific match types such as phrase or exact match.

If you select phrase or exact match, you can filter out irrelevant keywords. To do this, first click the filter icon or add filter option to the left of the dashboard.

Select Keyword Text to add negative keywords and filter your ideas list. Enter the keywords you don’t want to display, such as ‘Pottery Monday” and select Apply.

Once you hit Apply, the list will update with those keywords’ metrics. Focus on the average monthly searches or total keyword volume and the competition which means how many other brands or business are bidding on this term.

If you click and choose keywords, you can then quickly add any of these to a new ad group plan and choose what match type you would like. This is a very efficient way to filter out any terms that don’t resonate with your business and add specific keywords to your plan.

Now that you can add keywords to your account, you need to wrap your head around your ad spend for these keywords. As we mentioned at the beginning of our guide, Google Ads can easily blow a lot of money dependent on what keywords you are bidding on.

To get us started on working out how to forecast your ad spend, we need to return to the first page with the two options: Discover new keywords and Get Search Volume and Forecasts. This time we are going to select the right column:

Enter the keywords that you have decided on in the previous tutorial by entering them manually or selecting them from the interest list you have built, click Get Started: