How to generate thousands of keywords for your Paid Search campaigns.

Recently I’ve been stepping up my own activity in the paid search game and along the way have been trialling various methods of keyword generation. Instinct told me that the first thing I should do is crack open Excel and get to work on some super clever formula but no sooner had I started I had found this method to be both tedious and slow going. I’d like to think that I would have got there in the end but I just couldn’t get the thought out of my head that somebody far brighter than me had already been there, done that and developed something much more effective and in a fraction of the time. That’s when I decided to go looking for it…

On my travels I’ve discovered that there’s plenty of web based tools out there that will help you build and develop your keywords but they all seem to be rather clunky or offer limited flexibility. That’s why I was so excited to find this little gem… Keyword Convert. It’s a stand alone desktop application that grabs your keywords, calculates all the permutations, spell checks and throws in suggestions from a thesaurus then spits out the results into the familiar broad, phrase and exact match formats for your paid search campaigns… lovely jubbly!

Before we dive right in and run through a little example a bit of preparation is required and that is of course some keyword research. This is where we need to jump back online and use some of the excellent and no doubt familiar keyword suggestion that you’ve used before.

This little tutorial will assume that we are going to promote Broadband as an affiliate. So let’s get started then and use the following tools to dig up some keywords.

My personal favourite keyword tool is one which Aaron Wall developed that incorporates a number of tools all into one.

• http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

And some more familiar tools you should be using.

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Wordtracker (via Digitalpoint.com)

First thing you should notice when using the above is that the search terms are falling into a three distinct categories. This will help us when arranging our keywords into columns before running the permutations in KeywordConvert. The key categories as i’ve labelled them are as follows:

• Generic terms – i.e Broadband or Broadband Provider
• Brand + Generic – i.e Sky Broadband, AOL Broadband
• Modifiers + Generic – i.e Best Broadband, Cheap Broadband

With this in mind I set about grabbing as many useful terms as possible and arranging them into an excel sheet for later use.

Now that we have our keywords all sorted and ready to go let’s fire up KeywordConvert and see what we’ve got. The first thing to do is to cut and paste the 3 separate columns of keyword information into the matching columns in KeywordConvert like so.

At this point once you have copied across all of your words you can elect to run a spell check or select individual keywords and use the thesaurus to expand on your researched terms. Seeing as we actually want to include misspells in our selection we’ll be skipping this process.

Next up, and the best bit of all is the permutation stage where well will cross reference all the words in each column and see exactly how many terms we have managed to generate. To enable this we must first select the advanced options tab (4th icon at the top left) and select the columns you do and don’t want to include together in the final output

Last but not least hit the icon that looks like a browser refresh button which will generate the final list.

The result? Well using simple list of Broadband terms which was in no way a comprehensive list I managed to generate a whopping 15,449 keywords/phrases. Not bad for 10/15 minutes work.

It’s important to note that only a small percentage of these new keywords will generate any serious volume but that’s not the real goal here. What we’re trying to do is extend our reach and cover any permutations we may have missed out manually and grow the tail. In this day and age it’s becoming increasingly important to cover the lower part of the tail where you will find great conversions at a fraction of the cost even if these sales only appear once every blue moon. The important bit is that when that search is made that you are there to capture them.

I don’t promote broadband myself but you are more that welcome to download and use the final list which can be found below. Don’t forget to include plenty of negative match words :)

Download the final Broadband PPC keywords here (3 MB)