Google Ads keyword research and optimization helps you decide manage budgets optimally, manage campaigns effectively, and build better ads, ultimately leading to better digital marketing performance for your business. Always be cautious while choosing the keywords to be targeted and contrary to Google’s guidelines of using broad match, I highly suggest using exact and phrase match keywords to properly utilize your budgets and get better data for further analysis.

I manage over USD 1 Million monthly budget on Google Ads and Bing Ads. The keyword research and optimization strategies that I will discuss have helped channelize the spends towards the best performing KWs while keeping a check on CPCs. This in turn has led to over 20% increase in CPA for our client’s lead gen program.

I will also reveal some secrets about bidding optimizations and keyword CPCs. So read till the end to find out how to get maximum performance out of your Google Ads campaigns.

Google Ads Keyword optimization begins with impeccable keyword research:

1. Understanding your customers
2. Exploring their intent and behavior
3. Discovering the market size
4. Unearthing industry dynamics and competition

How would you find the keywords for your business?

Step 1: Think about the topics or phrases that come to your mind if you had to search for your products or services. Make these your starting point. We will elaborate this by considering 2 examples throughout this article: for hotels – hotel in New York and for SAAS – reputation management

Step 2: Use closely matching words or synonyms. Examples; hotel in NYC, ORM or manage online reputation

Step 3: Next, make it more specific and long tailed – 5 star hotel in new york, reputation management for hotels

Step 4: Now add the intent – book hotel in New York, reputation management pricing

Step 5: Mix services/products – 5 star hotel in New York with parking, reputation management software for hotels

Step 6: With your core keywords now being finalized, we move to peripheral keywords, that is, keywords which are closely related to your core keywords. The examples here would be – hotels near empire state, manage hotel reputation

Step 7: Once you are done with such permutations and combinations, use Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool to expand on these keywords and find their search volumes as well as market competition

Step 8: Google Keyword Planner Tool will provide you with hundreds of keywords – do you want to bid on all of them? Definitely No!

How would you choose the best keywords for your business?

1. Your core KWs are still the most important ones (not more than 15-20). Find their search volume and group them into one campaign and possibly 2-3 ad sets. Check for Google’s highest and lowest bid from Keyword Planner data. Use the average of that bid and calculate the budget to target 60-70% of impressions with the average CTR for those KWs or industry. Note: Use only Exact and Phrase Match of these KWs
2. Perform a similar process for your peripheral KWs and calculate the budget to target 25-30% of the search volume for these KWs or if your budget is lower, then as much as your budget allows. Again, use only Exact and Phrase match.
3. Finally, create a duplicate campaign of your core KWs. Change the match type to Broad Match. Add Exact and Phrase matches of all KWs as exclusion to this campaign. Reduce the budget to just 10-20% of the original campaign. This will help you target news KWs and discover search queries that can later be added to your core or peripheral campaigns.
4. If you have more than one product or service, repeat the process for each.

Now to some other important settings for your campaigns:

1. Start new campaigns with CPC bidding and later move to tCPA or tRoAS. 
2. Once your campaigns are well established, use portfolio bids (without shared budgets). Use tCPA or tRoAS with maximum CPC bids configured. This will help you control your CPC while also controlling the overall performance. Google’s automation tends to bid erratically high on CPC’s, thus lowering your overall performance.
3. Be precise with your location settings. Use presence in the location rather than interest in the location
4. Do not switch on the broad match setting. KEEP IT PAUSED!
5. Initially, you want to control your messaging to understand custom behavior. Thus, keep automated text assets setting paused. Later, as you optimize your landing page and ad content, you can switch on this setting.
6. Ensure that user’s search queries match your keywords which in turn are part of your ad messaging and also your landing page content.
7. To optimize Google Ads for local business, you need to focus on Local KWs and near me KWs

Apart from all this, you have to regularly go through the search terms/query report and exclude irrelevant or non performing queries.

Armed with all this information, you are ready to confront the challenges related to Google Ads Keyword optimizations. Your budget management will be impeccable leading to reduced wasted spend and better overall performance.

Most businesses will be able to set up their Google Ads campaigns and keywords using this strategy but there is a lot more which goes into day to day optimizations. You have to constantly improve your ads, adjust bids based on market competition, current keyword performance, your business budgets as well as overall industry search volume and seasonality. Most businesses require dedicated professionals to take care of these day to day tasks and maintain a healthy Google Ads account. 

Finally, there is also the aspect of multiple integrations – with GA4, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager for site tag/pixel and offline conversions import for B2B or online to offline businesses. You need to set up audiences and targeting based on the data provided by your tag, GA4, offline imports or custom lists. These are all part of advanced Google Ads tactics beyond keyword optimization and budget management.

Mindless helps businesses get the best performance out of their Google Ads account. We have helped our B2C clients achieve 20x return on ad spend and B2B clients lower CPL by 20% while improving lead quality and funnel conversion rates. If your business is facing the challenge in optimizing Google Ads or other paid media channels, then book a free consulting session with our experts and find out how we can help your business achieve new heights.

You can also mail us on sales@mindless.digital for any queries.