In order to get the most out of Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN (NineMSN here in Australia) the key is in building a great keyword list. If your pay per click keyword list is not deep enough, you’ll end up paying far more than you need to attract targeted, qualified prospects to your site.. So, what are the steps to developing a great keyword list?

The first thing that you need to do is develop your core list. These are the terms that you believe your customers will use to find products and services like yours. Let’s say you’re a law firm and you focus on divorce law. What do you think people will type in to search for representation. It’s important to picture the buying cycle when coming up with this list. People will search for generic keywords when at the start of the buying cycle and will get more specific when they’re ready to buy. They’ll use keywords including your competitors brand names, specific locations, pricing inquiries, etc. etc.

Right now it’s not important that you get it right. We’re only starting the process of building your pay per click campaign.

So step one is:

1.Write down the top search terms that you can think of that describe your business or service. I suggest keeping this list on a spreadsheet if at all possible — this will make it easier to organize and submit later.

The second step is to expand this list. There are a lot of tools available on the market both free and paid for to help you to develop your keyword list. Try the Google Keyword Suggestion tool. This is highly effective and free (Just do a Google search, you’ll find it). For my clients I analyse their competitors keywords. I find out what is working and what isn’t. I also monitor their activity over the course of the week to see what kind of changes they make. But if you want to do it for yourself, step two is:

2. Use the Google ‘Search Suggestion Tool’ to get an idea of the popularity of each search term and enter this number under a ‘monthly impressions’ column in your spreadsheet. The tool is located here.

When I searched on our example keywords, I found that those search terms (for the local area of Brisbane) were recently searched as follows:

Divorce - 301,000 (scary I know)

But then I had to look at keywords that are more relevant to buyers

Divorce family law - 1,000
Divorce solicitors - 260
Divorce services - 260

I gathered a lot more key phrases than that and all though it doesn’t sound like much, we were able to generate about 5000 worth of relevant searches

The next thing you need to do is to “long tail” your keywords to make them more specific. The good search engines like Google are about relevancy and the more relevant your keywords are in your pay per click campaign, the cheaper it will be to get prime position. Try adding every suburb in your city to the end of each word or phrase, E.g. Divorce services parramatta. Or try using price related additions - Cheap divorce solicitors.

3. Add long-tails to your key phrases such as: cheap, discount, low cost, free, premium, authentic, etc. Check the Search Suggestion Tool to assess the number of searches conducted for those terms in the previous month. Enter the terms and data into your spreadsheet under ‘monthly impressions’.

The purpose of these activities is to generate the longest possible list of relevant search terms possible. Why? Remember, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your message. You pay nothing extra to simply list more keywords. Additionally, the more keywords you have, and the more specific the search phrases are, the more likely that your visitor will be truly interested in your product or service. For example: ‘divorce is a very general search term. Anyone interested in the topic of divorce including other solicitors doing research might search using this term. However, ‘divorce solicitors brisbane’ is a more targeted search term.

4. At this point in the process, you should have a fairly comprehensive list of targeted search terms and phrases. I suggest you sort the terms on your spreadsheet by ‘monthly impressions’ to get a sense of which terms are most popular. These are the terms that can end up costing you the most advertising dollars if you choose to bid for a high ranking.

Congratulations! You have now generated a comprehensive keyword list that will get you ahead of your competitors. This is obviously the first of many steps. It’s important to monitor the results that you’re generating from your investment and tweak the bid amounts to get the best ROI on your pay per click campaigns.