One of the most important aspects of a successful PPC campaign is choosing your keywords. Choosing the wrong keywords for your campaign can result in users never finding your site or can waste your advertising budget on non-targeted traffic.  But how do you choose your keywords? There are countless tools to estimate search volume and competition of specific keywords.  But, this research from Marketing Sherpa finds that looking at keywords that are already driving traffic and conversions is the best method of determining which keywords to choose.

Tactics of Keyword Research

Understanding the terms that your customers are using is critical to finding the best keywords and this research supports that idea.  Determining the keywords that actual customers are using is critical, and can be done looking at your analytics to determine keywords that are currently directing traffic to your site as well as your site search to find out what visitors are looking for when they are on your site.  Analyzing competitor’s sites is also an important tactic in determining popular industry-specific terms.  Using keyword tools is still one aspect of choosing the right keywords, but should be used in conjuction with many other research methodologies as well.