Poor Keywords can Hurt your Business

Having bad keywords can lose you money faster than you can imagine. If you don’t do anything about it, you might run out of funds, your campaign might shut down, or worse, your business might suffer. Of course you do not want that to happen so you and your marketing team will work hard day and night to identify which keywords are working and which are not.

In a KISSMetrics webinar conducted by Jamie Smith of iSpionage, we were shown how to get an advantage with competitive PPC (Pay Per Click) Data. In this excerpt, Convert shares insights on how poor keywords can hurt your business. Proper keywords can help with a website’s conversion. Conversion is a marketing technique of turning casual visitors into paying customers.

Match It Perfectly

The basic rule still applies – your website and keywords need to be a 100% match to your defined target market.

There is no way that you can work on keywords without doing a market research and understanding your customer base – what are you selling? Who is your target market? Yes, you need to drive as much profit as you can and this is difficult because you are aiming to reach this goal in the “search world” or “keyword level”. This world is a very competitive place. It may seem unknown to many, but it has actually existed and is currently existing impacting the lives of many online marketers today.

[Tweet “Keyword Tip: Do not overthink, do not over do. In other words – do not overwrite.”]

The basic rule still applies – your website and keywords need to be a 100% match to your defined target market. It will not matter if you are getting many visitors in a day because what is important is if you are attracting the customers that you aimed for. If you got your keywords wrong, you will only create false traffic to your website that will not impact your business at all. It is a waste of time and money. The best keywords are those that are able to capture the interest of your “paying customers”.

How Are You Losing Your Money?

The rule is to make the keywords as simple and precise as possible. Remember, this is not search engine optimization so it makes no use to broaden your keywords.

In an article published by Andy Black, he mentioned the following: “One of the main reasons people fail with Adwords paid search is that they use too much broad match”. The rule is to make the keywords as simple and precise as possible. Remember, this is not search engine optimization so it makes no use to broaden your keywords. Think of it this way – you are making a term that the people would normally type in the search engine. You are losing your money if you are doing the following mistakes:

• Not defining your target market – By defining the target market, you will be able to describe your customers even with your eyes closed – how they look like, their age, their gender, their location, their profession, even their hobbies. Basically, this is everything that you can think of about that person. You cannot make effective keywords if you cannot fully describe who you want to reach.
• Not refining your search – Once you have the keywords listed, you still need to trim those keywords into a more refined search using keyword suggestion tools that are installed in your keyword research tool. Well-refined keywords can describe what your web content is all about.
• Not reviewing your analytics – Your analytics will tell you exactly how you are performing in terms of your keywords. It pays to visit your analytics as much as you can so you can implement the changes once a downtrend becomes evident.

In online marketing, you need to lose some to gain some. But if you are losing more than what you gain, there is something wrong. Not addressing the problem early on will create a sinkhole- it will eat your business in time. So, in order to avoid this descent, you have to address the problem early and realize what you have to change.