As mentioned in the previous blog, keyword selection is the first and most important step in running a PPC campaign. This will probably consume most time of the entire PPC campaign, well it did at least for me. It is critical that we select the terms that are most likely going to be used by our target market. What we did was try to get into our market’s “brain” and think of what they would search for.

In our line of business we offer various writing services. We decided that since we offer many services such as ghost-writing, grant proposal writing, SEO articles, etc. that we would just start off focusing on one specific service rather than writing services in general. We selected SEO articles for numerous reasons, but mostly because we felt that the demand for these articles was highest at the time.

I assigned a couple of people on the team the task of just brainstorming as many terms as possible that related to SEO articles. So each person had to think: If I wanted SEO articles what would I type in the search engine. You may think “how many terms can we possibly come up with?” which was my initial thought, but here is a condensed list of our terms to illustrate that coming up with many variations is possible:

• SEO article
• SEO articles
• SEO professional writers
• SEO writing services
• Discounted SEO articles
• SEO article writers
• SEO article packages
• Discounted SEO article packages

You can see from just one service there are many terms that a potential client can search for to receive the desired result. So out of maybe 100 narrowed down terms it was time to decide which one was worth the investment. There are a couple of ways to do this, you can:

• Narrow down the terms based on what “sounds” like a good idea.
• Randomly choose terms or
• Go through another process which will calculate the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) for you and decide based on that.

Of course we had to choose option 3, not only because it probably gives the most accurate measurable results but because it would give my employers the satisfaction of piling on more work ?

So there are five basic steps in coming up with the KEI and I already had the first one done!

1. On a blank Word page start writing anything and everything that comes to your mind about the services you provide. Include variations of the same keyword. For example instead of SEO writing services, you might use SEO services or search engine optimization writing services. Try not to use single words because the reality is that when users search for a term they tend to be very specific. Using short specific phrases is ideal. So when targeting a certain industry with our writing services, the keywords would be something like: medical seo articles or discounted medical seo writing services.

2. Now it’s time to use Microsoft Excel! So on an excel spreadsheet type the following terms in the first four columns:

In step 4 it’ll be time to fill in each of these columns, but first:

3. WordTracker: This is an extremely useful tool that I used first as a free trial and then as a paid service to generate ideal and profitable keywords. If this is your first time you might want to use the trial WordTracker which will give you the optimal keywords for some search engines such as MSN but not for Google. But for a trial purpose it still provides useful information that we will need to calculate the KEI.

4. Finally it’s time to fill the columns:

1. Keywords – pick the keywords that showed the most promise from WordTracker.
2. Popularity – this is a number that you get from WordTracker results and is titled popularity
3. Competitors – You need to type each word in “quotes” on Google and the number of results is the number of sites you will be competing against. So this number goes into the Competitors column.
4. KEI – The Keyword Effectiveness Index is the square of the popularity of a keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by the number of sites which appear in Google for that keyword. It is designed to measure which keywords are worth optimizing your site for. Higher the KEI, better the keyword.

5. Sort your results using excel’s sorting feature under tools. Sort the keywords by highest KEI. A KEI that we would consider for a PPC campaign would receive a score of 200 or above. Anything above 100 can be considered, anything below shouldn’t.

You see now why I said this is the most time consuming process. It took us about 3 weeks because we were very inefficient and did not research the PPC process in a detailed manner to start with. After knowing what I know now, I would expect the keyword selection process to take about a week at most. I’d love to hear any of your stories, experiences or challenges that you went through during this step. Let’s learn from each other’s mistakes so that we can all run more efficient and successful PPC campaigns!