Make The Most Of One-Word Keywords In Your AdWords Camapign

If you're like most, you will be constantly searching for
the next AdWord Keyword to add to your campaign and
doubtless you will at some time be tempted to use a one-word
key phrase because of the huge number of searches these
phrases attract.

Keep in mind when selecting one-word key phrases that your
ad will get seen in lots of different circumstances over
which you have no direct control. Some of these impressions
will be useful to your business, but many will not and could
even do your account harm.

Just imagine for a moment that you were to use the key
phrase golf to advertise your online store selling golf
clubs.

Your ad would probably appear for phrases like golf clubs
and golf drivers which would be good for your business. But
it might also appear for a lot of irrelevant phrases like
golf bag, golf buggies, golf course, golf clothing and a
whole lot more.

These unwanted impressions will at best reduce your
click-through rate, meaning you have to increase your bid to
remain competitive, at worst get your ad clicked on by
people who have absolutely no interest in what you have to
offer.

Clearly, you could play safe and only add keywords to your
AdWords campaign that have two or more words in them. But
that would over look a number of targeted one-word key
phrases that potentially could be very profitable.

Take the case of our online retailer selling golf clubs
again.

Anyone that is familiar with the game of golf will probably
have heard of Ping. They are well known manufacturers of
good quality golf clubs. Unfortunately, it is also a very
common term used in Internet communications.

If our golf club retailer were to use this one-word key term
to sell golf clubs, the first thing they would want to do is
build a very comprehensive negative keyword list. Your ad
needs to appear for phrases like ping putter and ping irons
but not for phrases like ping packets and ping reply.

Once a detailed negative keyword list has been built, you
can start using your one-word key phrase in your AdWords
campaign. But make sure you monitor closely the keywords
performance. A popular one-word keyword can suck your budget
dry in hours if left unchecked.

Run a 'Search Query Performance' report every day and make a
note of all the keywords for which your ad is being shown.
If there are any that are not relevant to your business, add
them to your negative keywords list.

From the keywords that remain, specifically target the most
popular by adding them to their own ad groups and making the
keywords exact match.

Don't forget to also add those same keywords to the negative
keywords list for your one-word keyword. You don't want your
general ad to accidentally show for these keywords anymore.

After a week or two, you'll have a highly tuned one-word
keyword phrase that will show your ad against a whole range
of different search phrases and a number of spin-off ad
groups containing your more targeted keyword phrases.

You can now afford to back off your optimization routine a
bit.

You'll still want to run regular Performance reports, but
not as often as you did when you first started. Once a week
should be fine.

Over time, continue to optimize and fine tune your one-word
key phrase and to build an ever more comprehensive list of
popular keywords to specifically target.

It's true that using one-word phrases as an AdWord keyword
can be a very risky strategy. And you must be prepared to
initially loose some money while you optimize your campaign.

But once you've done all the hard work, your ad will get
shown for a whole bunch of searches that are just not worth
targeting individually. Additionally, you'll also get loads
of other popular keywords to target that you know people are
using in their searches.