You may want to read the introduction about the difference between Paid and Organic if you’ve not done so already to provide some further content.
Keywords
Understanding the fundamentals of Paid Search is fairly straightforward once you understand the concept of keywords.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, a keyword is any word or group of words put into a search engine by a user.
And a search engine’s job is to try and interpret that keyword to give the user the highest quality results according to what it thinks the user is looking for.
When looking at putting together a paid search campaign you need to identify keywords that you think will lead to a visit to your website and provide the information they are looking for which may result in an enquiry or application if a customer is searching for that word or phrase.
The more comprehensive the keywords, the harder your budget is going to work for you in yielding results.
In Paid Search there are really only two products to consider at this time.
- Google Ads – with 90% of market share
- Microsoft Ads – with 3% of market share
And the good news is that Microsoft Ads is almost a carbon copy of Google Ads, so if you learn the concepts of Google, they are instantly transferable.
Bidding in Paid Search
Before considering which keywords to target, let’s briefly cover how Google decides which companies targeting that keyword get their ads in the top spots. And in short it’s to do with:
- Budget – where companies all targeting the same keyword essentially go into a virtual auction to determine who gets which spot
- Quality – where the content is judged on relevancy (a bit like in search engine optimisation) to influence the positions and the bidding
Concept of choosing keywords
Let’s say you’re trying to drive traffic through Paid Search to the University of Stamford’s accommodation homepage.
‘student accommodation’ would be a good keyword to target, right?
No! Because the chances that someone is looking for student accommodation in Stamford if they just type in ‘student accommodation’ is probably very slim. There’s a 99%+ chance they are looking for student accommodation somewhere else – indeed if they are not just looking for generic information about student accommodation. After all, just typing ‘student accommodation’ into a search engine if you are looking for somewhere specific would be an odd thing to do.
What about ‘Stamford accommodation’? Is that a good keyword?
Again, probably not. It’s better than the previous one, but this time, ask yourself whether someone that types in ‘Stamford accommodation’ is looking for student accommodation in Stamford. They’re probably looking for hotels or other non-student accommodation.
These two examples might seem obvious, but many people new to Paid Search think it’s a good idea to try and be as broad in identifying keywords as possible in the hope that they might catch some traffic from that keyword. This is a bad strategy because you will be putting money into traffic that is very likely to not be interested in your content and therefore convert into a customer. Or even worse you will be putting money into highly competitive (and irrelevant) keywords only to yield poor results. In the example of ‘Stamford accommodation’, do you really want to be bidding against the Hilton and the Marriott?
Choosing good keywords involves understanding:
- Relevance and intent – are people searching for this keyword likely to be interested in my product?
- Competition – how many competitors are also targeting my keyword?
- Search volume – how many people are actually searching for my keyword?
Typical keywords in our sector
Thankfully we’ve tested a range of keywords – here are a few main pointers:
- Check if your competitors are targeting your block or brand names. For example, you ordinarily might not want to bid on ‘Westfield Court’ because you know that if someone is searching for that specific keyword, there is a good chance they are looking for your content and you can rely on the organic result. That changes however if a competitor is bidding on that keyword (which could be a good strategy!) and you want to ensure there’s no chance of them diverting traffic away from you.
- Generic keywords (such as
'Stamford student accommodation‘) will be more competitive than keywords with your institutional name in them (such as'University of Stamford student accommodation'). This will in part be because we benefit from the ‘quality’ factor as discussed above where our content is more relevant with the institution’s name in. Simplifications of the institution name (such as'Stamford university student accommodation') are likely to sit in between in terms of competitiveness. - Bid on competitor’s block or brand names. You may be able to divert sales away from them, or at least remind potential customers you exist as an option!
Choosing new keywords
Although we’ve provided the above list as a starting point, why not think about new keywords which might be relevant to your institution or product? Whilst there are many 3rd-party tools offering services to help generate keywords, the reality is you only really need one:
- Google Keyword Planner – which helps give lots of interesting information (including search traffic) about keywords you have in mind
- Microsoft Ads Keyword Planner – as above, but with Bing-related data