How to find "wide" keywords, not deep??

Here's my honest oppinion.

Keywords like this are not worth the time or effort for PPC:

"acne treatments that involve home remedies"

However they are great as phrases or contextual text links for SEO.

A phrase like that would deliver very few impressions and virtually no clicks.

Your time is better spent and far more profitable if you just focus on the top 5 - 10 keywords phrases.

Go [exact match]

And move on to repeat this with another niche.

The amount of time you will spend looking for keywords and thinking about keyphrases that NEVER DELIVER anything would have been far better spent, applying the fast, fast, fast method to multiple niches.

Click for click (even though you get less clicks) its far more profitable.

I speak from experience.

The other side of the coin is if you can afford to spend $40k a day on PPC.

I know people who do both.

What you are asking for help with is the stuff that guys who make money, tried and stopped.

There's no in between.

Don't know how long you've been at this, and I don't mean my post to seem negative, but if you try the low number of keywords, [exact match], on multiple niches (try different ones) you will see how effective it is.

The time saving element of that stratgey is mind blowing in the long term.

Also you are only targeting highly targeted keywords/phrases so the conversion ratio is very high.

Regards

Aaron.

To give you ideas you could look at the meta keywords of the top 10 ranked sites in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Tiffani, with all due respect, I expressly said I did not intend my suggestion as an insult. Nor was my post negative. The suggestions and techniques offered were entirely constructive and real-world advice, pointing out a tool that we all have. Including you.

If you have spent any sort of time reading this and other boards, one common theme is that everybody wants an automated tool to do the earnest work for them. Nobody wants to have to actually work for the prize. And in my opinion, it shows ... I mean, just look at the preponderance of crap sites out there.

A computer program can never create the quality that comes from the human brain. A computer program also can never create material that humans respond best to. Humans respond to humans.

Brainstorming is a perfectly constructive, useful, everyday technique that was taught to all of us starting way back in grade school, and it's used throughout high school (let alone college). Brainstorming is free, effective, creative, far-reaching, wide-ranging, fast, efficient, and can identify relationships to things that computers simply cannot.

I'm sorry that the suggestion of thinking for oneself is apparently so offensive. Realize however, that when you ask for suggestions, you probably won't like some of them... such is the nature of a forum. If you aren't prepared for the answers, it's probably best not to ask the question.

Good luck with your project.

Bailey

Hi Tiffani,

Actually all the comments by USEO-Aron, Bailey and just visiting are spot on. And none of the comments I read appeared negative to me.

I can tell you from experience the long term keywords do work for me and for my subscribers. The keyword terms I use in their articles appear on Google, Yahoo, MSN on top 3 pages and they stay there. I'm making money with them and so are my customers. They aren't getting rich but are making 200-300 a month in several niches.

But to your original question I use Micro Niche Finder and it does a heck of a good job of finding the the long tail phrase keywords. But then that's when your brainstorming and a white board will kick butt for you.

If you would like a review it with my affiliate link just send me a PM and I will be glad to give it to you. But if you prefer no affiliate link, just go to MicroNicheFinder.com.

Ken Leatherman

Aaron,

You said:

"Your time is better spent and far more profitable if you just focus on the top 5 - 10 keywords phrases."

I disagree. Here's why:

1. This is a sure fire way for a newbie to burn through all his adspend in a very short time (ie loose a boatload of money) especially on high traffic terms.

2. The competition on the top traffic keywords is crazy sometimes, pushing CPC way over the breakeven point. Note that most people push for a sale directly without any attempt to push visitors into a funnel (where they might breakeven and start to profit in the long run). So they will lose money right off the bat.

3. The top traffic terms are usually entered into the SEs by people who are in research mode (of course there are exceptions) but in my experience, the high traffic keywords produce much weaker conversion rates than "long tail" keywords. And by "long tail" I am not talking about obscure keywords that no one will ever search for, I'm talking about keywords where there is not a lot of competition (mainly because not many advertisers has thought of bidding on the keywords)

Ultimately, to find the keywords that will translate to profit, you will have to do a lot of testing.

An Example:

If I was to enter the acne cure market, I would build my keyword list as follow:

Broad List

Blackheads
blackhead clear
blackhead cleanser
blackhead prevent

pimples
cures for pimples
get rid of pimples
clear pimples
remove pimples

blocked pore
cause of blocked pore
treat blocked pore

clogged skin pore
clear clogged skin pore
remedy clogged skin pore

homemade face scrub
ingredients homemade face scrub

flaky skin
cure flaky skin
flaky skin remedy

Zits
remedy zits
remove zits
cure zits

Acnce
acne treatment
acne remedy


Now of course, each subniche will have a lot more search phrases, and I will then subgroup the subniches into groups according to patterns (you will start to notice patters if you work through your list)

I would make this initial list as big as possible. The bigger the better. For this example, lets say I get my list to 10,000 (easy as this is a big market with a lot of people searching)

I will now structure my campaign correctly and launch (This is where tracking comes in. You MUST track every single thing you can)

If the campaign starts to produce traffic and sales, I will look at my tracking data.

Here is what I'm looking for (I look for a lot of things and I have a lot of systems in place, so I will just give a short answer):

Which keywords are getting clicked but are not producing sales (ie costing me money). Drop them. In most cases, this will be your top search terms (In this example it will be the acne keywords ie acne treatment, acne remedy etc)

Which keywords are getting clicked and are producing sales. I will now focus on these keywords. So in this example, we notice that our "blocked pore" keywords and our "zits" keywords are translating into sales.

I will now do more research and find every keyword I can that relates to "blocked pore" and "zits". A good way to do this is to enter blocked pore into Google's keyword tool and UNCHECK the use synonyms box.

So, over time I am swapping my broad list for my deep list. Eventually all that will be left are keywords that produce sales on a consistent basis.

The thing is, you can't guess what keywords this will be. How do you know that remove my zits will convert better than acne treatment? There is no way to know, that is why you must put both out there and let the market tell you.

If you where only bidding on the top search terms, you would have never discovered the blocked pores and zits keywords that are now putting money in your pocket.

I have rambled a bit, hope it makes sense.

Regards,

AffiliatePPC

Make them yourself.

A lot of the searches done in Google have never been searched for before. Use a concatenation tool (excel will do this) to mix core keywords and synonyms together with modifiers like cure, fix, how to etc..... and then group them out into small adgroups using ad words editor.

Then you watch for the trends and zoom in on them...

Affiliate PPC,

Thank you for taking the time to write your post. It was extremely helpful. And I am judging by your user name you use this mostly with PPC? Would you use this method with article marketing as well?

Thank you so much again.
Tiffani

What is the benefit of using exact match instead of broad match?

Also use keycompete.com... type in a competitor and get all of the keywords they are using in ppc... very powerful tool, for short and longtail keywords.