Google’s Guide to Conquering Online Keyword Advertising

Do you spend too much time and money on Google AdWords without the ROI you were expecting? Don’t fret. Google released a guide detailing keyword best practices to cultivate your business’ online ad spending. This means no more guessing on what is or isn’t important so you get the most bang for your buck.

Don’t have time to read the 12-page guide.We’ve pulled out the most important points for your convenience below.

1. Don’t create minute variations. Close keyword variations will cover this traffic for you. Misspellings, singulars/plurals, acronyms, abbreviations, accents and stemmings are all included in the matching behavior of your keyword.
2. Let them run their course. Avoid the need for continual updates to your keyword lists every time you make a change to your site.
3. Don’t exhaust resources on negatives. Use the Keyword Planner or your search terms reports to find the most impactful negatives. Save money by avoiding clicks from people that aren’t going to become customers.
4. Map out their search process. What are all the possible ways that they could be searching for what you’re offering? Be sure you’re present at every step.
5. Keywords length matters. Keywords that contain five words or more drive less than half the volume of clicks and impressions on average. Keywords with 30 or more characters (including spaces) drive fewer than half the clicks and impressions on average than shorter keywords. Why? Longer keywords take more effort to define and deliver less than half the volume; they may not be in your best interest.
6. Semantic vs. Syntactic searches. Know the difference between semantic keyword match types and syntactic ones. Semantic is the meaning of the user’s search. If you type in flower arrangement, you’ll get matches for flower arrangement, floral arrangement, arranging flowers, etc. Syntactic is the order of the words in a user’s search or close variations of those words. Searching for [flower arrangement] will only return matches for the exact word and order: flower arrangement.
7. Search possibilities. Fifteen percent of queries each day on Google haven’t been searched before.

Ready to relinquish your ROI anguish? Appleton Creative is an award-winning, full-service advertising agency located in Orlando, Florida. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to provide marketing strategies through print, web, social media and video production – all in-house. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your marketing goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.

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