2012 – This is your year to experience abundance in the ROI of your online marketing efforts. As I mentioned last month, there are many factors that will contribute to the success or failure of a paid search campaign. Last month we talked about the importance of keyword selection as it pertains to relevancy and budget. This month we will be following up with a discussion about grouping keywords.
How Important Is It To Group Your Keywords By Theme?
Think about it this way. What would happen if you went to the grocery store and the dairy products weren’t grouped with the dairy products? What if the meat products were grouped with the cookies? It would be utter chaos. Imagine how long it would take you to find the item you wanted. Don’t bother to ask an employee. If the items are not grouped together in a logical order, they do not have the information needed to send you off in the right direction.
Think of the search engine as the employee, the internet as the store and you have the products that sit on the shelves. If a customer enters the store (the internet) wishing to buy a pair of shoes and you have themed ad groups that are specific to shoes (meaning that every keyword in that ad group is relevant to shoes) the employee (search engine) will easily be able to direct the customer to your ad. On the other hand, if your ad group contains keywords related to shoes, clothes, purses, and hats, the search engine will not know whether or not your ad is relevant to what the customer wants.
How Tightly Themed Should Ad Groups Be?
You could have an ad group with keywords that are all related to hats. Or you could have two ad groups. One that contained keywords related to men’s hats and the other to women’s hats. You might even decide to have another ad group for children’s hats. Maybe you want to have ad groups for each hat designer or purpose. There are many ways correct ways to them an ad group. When in doubt, I like to ask myself, “Can the same ad text apply to every keyword in this group?” If the answer is not “Yes”, I know I need to relook at the keywords in that group.
When you group related keywords together, you form themes that help you stay organized. Having close-knit groups of associated keywords enables you to cater your paid search ads to particular terms without the worry that you’ve missed an important keyword in the pile, or that you’re grouping irrelevant terms together by accident.
Why Should You Care About Relevancy?
The reward doesn’t end at better organization, however. By grouping keywords into themes, you’re showing search engines that you understand which of your keywords are related, and that you’ve segmented your ad groups accordingly. When Google sees that your keywords are relevant to the ads you have created and that they are relevant to what the customer wants, you will be rewarded with a higher quality score (QS). A higher QS means a lower cost-per-click for you. Next month we’ll talk more about how your QS impacts your bottom line.
