This is post 3 of 3 on how to do keyword research.  In post #1, we discussed organizing keyword groups.  Post #2 was all about creating small groups of keywords to test. Good news. The 24 words we created in post #2, have been tested (please use your imagination), and done very well.  Now we want to expand our keyword list.  So why the colored oranges?  Well, the new keywords we generate will be slices of our originals, but with new and different colors.

Expanding Keyword Groups

So, how do you turn your 24 keywords for 49ers football tickets, into 500?

Here are the steps you take to grow your keyword list:

1. Create more words from your original list
2. “Excel” in Excel
3. Add verbs, adverbs, and adjectives
4. Use tools to help expand even more

Create More Words From Your Original List

The first step in growing a keyword list is simply finding variations of each of the words that make up a keyword phrase.

For example, if one of our phrases was “San Francisco 49ers football ticket”, we’d want to find all the “colors” of each of those words.  The final phrase is broken down into 3 parts, “San Francisco 49ers”, “football, and “ticket”.

 
NOTE: The column labeled S above stands for “space”.  We’ve left a single space in that column to use in the concatenate formula that I shared about in post #2.

Here are just a couple of the possible areas to brainstorm.

1. Synonyms
2. Slang
3. Abbreviations
4. Misspellings

So for “San Francisco 49ers”, possible synonyms could include:

• San Francisco Forty Niners
• 49ers

Some slang terms:

• 9er
• San Fran

Abbreviation possibilities:

• SF
• S.F.

Finally some potential misspellings:

• Fortie Niner
• Fordee Niner

So in just a few minutes, we’ve created 8 new keywords for our 1st column.

Excel in Excel

If you had a pen and lots of paper, it’d be very tough to write down hundreds of words and keep them straight. With Excel we can do all the heavy lifting. It’s a life saver.

Here are some keyword short cuts you’ll want to learn:

• SHIFT+SPACE – if you are in any cell, it will select the whole row
• CTRL+SPACE – if you are in any cell, it will select the whole column
• SHIFT+CTRL+Plus(+/= key) – adds rows when you have a row or column selected
• SHIFT+Minus(_/-) key – deletes rows or columns
• CTRL+C – copies contents of a selected cell or row to the clip board
• CTRL+X – cuts contents of a selected cell or row
• CTRL+V – pastes what you cut or copied into the selected area
• CTRL+D – fills down the contents of the top cells to cells below

If you don’t know how to use the concatenate formula, see post #2.  It’s invaluable.

Let’s walk through a simple example of how these shortcuts can help. 

You’ve got two keyword phrases in Excel in rows 2 and 3 below.

 
You’ve come up with phrases to enter under Word #1 in addition to “San Francisco 49ers”.  You want to add 8 variations to the first column, so you need 8 more rows.  You select the row directly below where you want to add the rows.  You do this by clicking on any of the cells in the 3rd row (like the cell with the “NFL” keyword), and then press SHIFT+SPACE BAR.  The whole row will be gray if it is selected, as you see below.

Now while holding down the SHIFT and CTRL keys, press the Plus key (+/=) 8 times. You’ll have 8 more rows created.  Next type in your keywords.  We’ll use those we came up with above. This is what you’ll see.
 

You’ll want to fill in the blank spaces to the right of the words you entered, to complete your keyword phrases. You can do so following these steps:

1. Select the cell with the word football in it.
2. Hold the SHIFT key down, while pressing the right arrow key 3 times to also select the next 3 rows to the right.
3. Use SHIFT + CTRL plus the down arrow key once.  That will select down to the next words.
4. Then click the arrow key up once.

You should see the following:
 

Then while pressing CTRL, press D, and you’ll see:

You end up with 8 more keywords, by simply coming up with some new variations for column 1.  You can do the same for columns 2 and 3, replacing “football” for “NFL” and “ticket” with “seat” and many other words.  Those keyword shortcuts will come in handy.  You can quickly expand to hundreds and hundreds of keywords.

Add Verbs, Adverbs, and Adjectives

Another way to increase your keyword list is by adding verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. These longer words will have less search volume, but typically convert better, because they are so targeted.

Here are possible words you could add:

Verb = Buy
Adjective = Cheap
Adverb = Cheaply

A phrase like: San Francisco 49er Football Ticket can quickly become:

Buy San Francisco 49er Football Ticket
Cheap San Francisco 49er Football Ticket
Buy San Francisco 49er Football Ticket Cheaply

Make sense? The possibilities are almost endless.

Use Tools to Expand Even More

Finally, a couple of tools that can help expand your keyword list even more. 

Keyword Tumbler

People type phrases into search engines in all sorts of orders.  Instead of “San Francisco 49ers football ticket”, they may type in “ticket San Francisco 49ers football”.  This online tool has several features, but we’re interested in the 3rd one on the page.  This simple keyword tumbler tool makes all those different phrases for you.  Here is a screen shot of my tumbling “San Francisco 49er Football Ticket”.
 

There are more robust tumbling tools out there, but this one is simple and free.

Typos

I type typoss (get it? ) all the time.  Do all the search engines pick up typos?  This keyword typo generator can take a word like “San Francisco 49ers football ticket” and come up with 243 typos.  Try it for yourself.

NOTE: Google will do some of the tumbling and typo catching for you, but I think it’s better to cover your bases, especially if you are using multiple search engines.  Keyword tumbling can be handled by Google’s keyword matching options.  Feel free to read up on that.

In Conclusion

In the last 3 posts, I’ve shared a lot about how to go about doing keyword research.  I hope you’ve found it helpful and that it leads you to huge lists of keywords that work for you!

Photo credit, iChaz

In my 1st post on keyword research, I explained why we need to do keyword research and that the first step is to organize keyword groups.  Like in the game of Scrabble, we’ll go on in this post, to create keywords.  Do you just open up Microsoft Word or Excel and start typing?  You could (and I have).  But if you go through the process using both sides of your brain, you’ll come out with some really creative and organized lists of words.

 We ended post #1 having come up with 5 different categories for our NFL football keywords:

 
This post is all about creating small groups of keywords and testing.  I believe it is important to start small, test, and then expand your list of keywords. 

Here’s why I’d rather test 100-500 words in a couple different categories, rather than starting with 10,000 keywords.

• Takes a lot less time to generate a list & set it up in AdWords
• You can minimize your initial spend
• You’ll get results in a much shorter time period

Back to our example of keywords for NFL football tickets.

Here are the steps I take to create those keywords:

1. Brainstorm 3-5 word phrases
2. Break keyword phrases down
3. Expand that starter list
4. Add them back together
5. Create test ad groups
6. Make sure you can track your results
7. Launch a small campaign
8. Check your return on investment

Brainstorm 3-5 Phrase Words

So we’ll start with creating a small team specific list of keywords for the San Francisco 49ers, one of my favorite football teams.

I like to use these free keyword research tools to get started.

Here is my first list of words:

• San Francisco 49ers football ticket
• 49ers football ticket
• Forty-Niners football ticket
• Forty Niners football ticket
• San Francisco football ticket

Break Keyword Phrases Down

So now I want to break down these phrases into their components.  Here’s how they might look broken down in Microsoft Excel:

 
This helps me do two things:

• See the root words that are making up my phrases
• Get my words in Excel so I can really work on them

Expand That Starter List

Now were ready to expand that starter list using Excel and other brainstorming tools. So perhaps by using those tools or your own favorites, you come up with these additional words (in yellow) for each of your 3 columns: “SF 49ers”, “NFL”, and “seat”.  In reality you could come up with many, many more words.  My main focus here is to show you the process.

Add Them Back Together

So now you are ready to create all the variations from those 10 words.  You’ll use a formula in Excel called concatenate.  Concatenate allows you to essentially paste different columns together to make your phrases.  So words in columns 1-3, become a complete phrase. 

The formula looks like this: “=concatenate(A1,B1,C2)” where if A1 = “San Francisco 49ers”; B1 = “football”; and C2 = “ticket”, your phrase would be “San Francisco 49ers football ticket”.  One note: Excel does not assume you want spaces between words, so you’ll need to add them as well.  So the formula will actually look like: “=concatenate(A1,D1,B1,D1,C2)” where D1 is a column that just has a space in it.  This visual may help:

 
Hope that makes sense.

So when you use concatenate to save you all that typing, you come up with these 24 words in total.  New words are highlighted in yellow.

Create Test Ad Groups

I won’t go into great detail in this post about how to create a Google Adwords campaign.  That’s for another time.  I would set up the test like this:

• Campaign => NFL – teams
• Ad Group => 49ers
• Ad => “Buy 49ers Football Tickets”

That way if this test is successful, I can quickly add more keywords to this ad group and add more ad groups with other NFL teams.

Make Sure You Can Track Your Results

None of this matters unless you can track your results.  You need to be able to track the money you spend, to the sales on your website. It’s important to have a unique identifier for campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.  You should use a URL that is appended with something like: value=NFL+49ers+San-Francisco-49ers-Football-Ticket. 

• “NFL” equals the campaign
• “49ers” equals the team
• “San Francisco 49ers Football Ticket” equals the keyword

I’m surprised by how many companies run campaigns without this level of tracking.

Launch a Small Campaign

Your goal with this campaign is to determine a few things:

• Are there people searching for these keywords?
• Will people click on your ad?
• Is that traffic going to give you a decent ROI (return on investment)

Before you launch anything, you can put these keywords into Google’s external keyword tool and find out how much traffic they show for these terms.  I find sometimes it is accurate, other times, not so much.  At least it gives you a data point.  You need to determine how much to spend to make it a statistically significant test.  Let’s say we agree that we need to have a minimum of 500 visitors to determine whether these keywords are worth expanding.  If we pay $.45/click, we’ll need to spend $225 on this test.

Check Your Return on Investment

There are several possible results you may see:

• Not very many impressions – perhaps no one is searching for these words
• Impressions, but no clicks – perhaps the creative was lousy
• Traffic, but no sales – this is the worst!
• Traffic, sales, made back your ad spend & more - time to expand your list

If you’re test has been successful, then you’re ready to expand this list of keywords.   That’ll come in post #3.

Photo credit, WireLizard

First, what is keyword research and why do you need to do it?

Keyword research is uncovering the relevant keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for, so that you can focus your website or blog or PPC (pay per click) campaigns on the right words.  For example, if your website is built around the phrase “National Football League”, but everyone is searching for “NFL football”, you’ve missed an opportunity.  I know you “gurus” will say it’s more complex than that, but were talking about the basics here.

So how do you do keyword research?

Creating large, targeted groups of keywords is a lot of work, but can be a lot of fun as well.  In the next 3 posts, I’ll explain how I go about doing keyword research.  It’ll make it easier to follow if I use a real world example.  Let’s say you’re building out a list of NFL football keywords to promote Stubhub’s affiliate program with pay per click advertising on Google.

There are three steps to my process:

1. Organizing Keyword Groups
2. Creating Small Keyword Groups & Testing
3. Expanding Keyword Groups

Step #1 – Organize Keyword Groups

This step is crucial, but can be done fairly quickly.  If you get this first step wrong, you could have a huge mess on your hands.  In a pay per click campaign, it’s going to be about return on investment, so it’s very important to create buckets of similar keywords.  That way, you can track not only how a particular keyword is performing, but also a category of keywords.

Example: 10,000 NFL Keywords

Here are some of those keywords:

• NFL football tickets
• 49er football tickets
• Superbowl football tickets
• Preseason football tickets
• Cheap football tickets

What if you ran 10,000 NFL keywords on Google with no consideration for categories?

That would cause several problems:

• Turning on/off for times of year - you want to turn off all the preseason ticket keywords but where are they?
• Differing ads – if Vikings and 49er tickets are in the same ad group, how can you create specific ads?
• Differing bids based on competition and ROI – if you want to bid higher on certain word groups, where do you find them?

Here are some of the keyword categories you might create:

• Broad
• Team Specific
• Playoff
• Superbowl
• Preseason

These could end up being your campaigns in Google Adwords.

Now that I’m done with this step, I can go on to Step #2. 

Any thoughts? Questions?