This is #3 on paid search, Keywords and Keyword match types. Written for the beginner level.
One of the most critical components of putting your pay-per-click plan in place in that of choosing your Keywords and Keyword phrases and applying Keyword match types. This is very important to understand in keyword search, the way search engines search when you put your phrase into Google for example, and it will save you money.
It is simple to understand what a keyword is, search on “marketing” for example and billions of words come up applied to that subject. Let’s refine and use a phrase: marketing strategies for small business. Here less comes up which should be more specific to your request, and an even more specific keyword phrase would be “internet marketing strategies for small business”. Now we’re getting somewhere, and hopefully you are getting the info you want.
When you design a keyword strategy for your PPC ad campaign, you want it to be tight so you don’t waste money on clicks that you don’t care about. This is where keyword match types come in. For example, let’s take the case of the phrase internet marketing strategies for small business. Pretty good right, except your bid will come up when any of the words in this phrase is searched on, not so good. So even with a so-called long-tailed keyword (phrase) like we have chosen we still have to careful how we bid on it. Google has three keyword match types which you can apply in the adwords manager, broad match, phrase match and exact match.
So we have three ways to put the phrase into Google:
- internet marketing strategies for small business (broad match)
- “internet marketing strategies for small business” (phrase match)
- [internet marketing strategies for small business] (exact match)
In the first case above, any of these keywords can bring up your bid, in the second case the full phrase has to be used in the same order but other words can be contained in the phrase, in the third case this phrase must come in this exact order and with the exact words in order for your bid to come up. Which one do you want to come up and pay for with a potential click, if it were me, I would choose the second or third scenario. This what “keyword match types” is all about, not that confusing once explained.
Next week, more on paid search and how it works.
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