How To Choose Winning Keywords for Google Ads

To advertise on Google search, you specify a list of keywords to tell Google when you want your ads to show.

Here are some suggestions to improve your advertising returns:

Firstly, choose keywords which imply the person is looking for your business.  For example, keywords that include company, buy, services etc.

Do not use generic keywords that does not show clear intent e.g. name card will also show your ads when someone search for “how to write name nicely on a card”.  

You might also not want words that indicate people are still researching e.g. size, template.

Second, choose 2 to 3 word phrases and not a single keyword unless it is a brand or product name.

Lastly, don’t be greedy on choosing too many keywords at the start.  Start slow then scale when you see results.

Not only do you want to use keywords with purchase intent, you also want to make sure you actually sell those things?

Suppose you sell tennis shoes and specify a keyword like tennis shoes.  However you don’t sell hightops or sandals.  

If you use tennis shoes as keywords, your ads might actually show when someone search for tennis sandals, shoes for table tennis, hightop tennis shoes, and even “how to clean tennis shoes”!  You definitely wont want to show your ads in these cases.

Here are several ways.  Phrase match requires the words to appear in the exact order i.e. “tennis shoes”.

Exact match means your ads will show only when someone search for “tennis shoes”, but does not additional words like buy.

The simplest way in this case is to use negative keywords, which prevent your ads from showing when the query contains your specified keywords e.g. sandals, table, hightops.

Not only will using these match types save you unnecessary clicks, they will improve the quality of your ads and hence lower your costs too.  More of this in subsequent videos.