Small Business Essentials Series: Finding the Right Keywords for Your Business

Whether you own a local shoe store, deliver tasty pizzas in the neighborhood, or offer accounting services, as a small business owner, you probably don't have much time to navigate through complex search platforms, analyze massive Excel sheets or read through libraries of books that explain the ins and outs of paid search marketing.

With this in mind, I hope you’ll find some value in this brief introduction to advertising on Bing. This Small Business Series will cover five topics that will equip you with basic knowledge about the essentials of paid search. The goal, of course, is to offer you a profitable solution to acquire new customers.  

PART 1: Choosing and Expanding Keywords

Paid search advertising starts with a keyword list, the more accurate it is, the more successful you will be. Keywords are generally divided into two groups: head terms and tail terms. Head terms are typically broader keywords like “Shoes” or “Web Design” while the tail terms would be more specific like “Italian Leather Shoes“ or “Small Business Web Design”. One of my neighbors, David, actually owns a small shoe store, so I will use him as an example throughout this series.

Obviously the broader terms will generate much higher traffic. “Shoes” for example had 1.4 million impressions during a certain time frame while “Italian Leather Shoes” barely drove a little more than 1000 impressions during the same time. As a small business owner you have to be very conscious about the right mix between head and tail terms. Head terms are far more competitive and thus more expensive. Getting back to our shoe example the average cost per click (CPC) for “Shoes” was at $1.69 last month while “Italian Leather Shoes” was available at $0.37.

While building your keyword list you need to make a clear decision: do I want to attract larger crowds by bidding on the head terms or do I customize my list towards a niche market? For David the pros and cons were easy to see. When bidding on “Shoes” more people will look at his website and potentially visit his store. But as he is specialized in offering high quality (and rather pricy) European designer shoes the bargain hunter looking for children’s shoes certainly is not his typical audience. By including “Shoes” in his keyword list David quickly learned a lesson: he had to compete against the “big guys” from Payless Shoesource to Zappos.com, Nike and Kmart, even Amazon and eBay – resulting in higher costs and low click-through rates (CTR).

David’s unique niche is targeted towards the tail terms. He replaced “Shoes” with “European Shoes” and then expanded into “European Designer Shoes”, “Women’s European Shoes”, “Men’s European Leather Shoes” and so on. By combining some relevant individual terms like “Women’s”, “Men’s” , “European”, “Designer” etc. with the stem term “Shoes” he was able to build a highly relevant keyword list in a very short time. He also combined the term with the relevant brands he is selling like “Giardini” or “Fendi”. Additionally he added terms like “Buy”, “Cheap”, “Discount” and so on in front of them, resulting in a solid list of about one hundred keywords.

As a result David saw lower costs per click, better click-through rates, less competition and – most importantly - higher conversions. Why? Someone searching online for “Men’s Italian Designer Shoes” has already made a very conscious decision on what he wants to buy, while someone just searching for “Shoes” is still in the mindset of exploring the options. Over time, the more David learned about his audience, the more elaborate his keyword list became. Defining your unique niche and knowing your audience are the two essentials when you first build your keyword list.

If you haven't already downloaded it, adCenter offers a very useful, free add-in for Excel 2007 that can help in keyword list development, you'll find more information on the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence page located within the Learning Center on the main Microsoft Advertising site.

Once installed, just click on the new tab appearing in your Excel interface and type one or more keywords into any cell in Excel and highlight the cells.

Then simply use the “Generate Keyword” function on the ribbon to get a list of suggested keywords.

This will populate a list of suggested keywords similar to the screenshot below:

The score in column C indicates the likelihood that the keyword is relevant. Remove the keywords that don’t fit your business (David actually took out “cheap shoes”, “discount shoes” and “European shoe sizing”) and just add the remaining ones to your keyword list. Again, in the generated list you can highlight any cell in the “Generated Keyword” column and run an additional research.

When a keyword list grows larger over time don’t forget to structure in a meaningful way. Divide the keywords across different campaigns and ad groups, so you can easily compare and measure performance. Avoid using default names like ad group #1 but rather associate the campaign or ad group name with the products. The better your structure, the easier the account is to manage.

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