It’s easier to find opportunities to improve your PPC campaign than you think. Learn more in this post.
What’s better than throwing up your website and making profit in just a few days, maybe a week or two?
That’s the benefit of PPC.
But, everything comes with a catch, including PPC. Go after highly competitive keywords, and your costs can quickly spiral completely out of control.
So how do you find those low-competition, high-profit margin keywords?
Some ideas:
- Listen to How People Actually Talk about Your Company’s Services
Do they search on “HVAC contractor Dallas,” or are they more likely to use terms like “AC repair Dallas,” or do they use other terms like “air conditioning repair Dallas, TX?”
The long-tail terms, the ones with 3, 4, or 5 or more words, have lower competition. It may cost you less per click to acquire new business.
You can find ideas for these terms by checking out competitor social media profiles, reading their customer’s testimonials, or talking to your customers in person. Write down the exact words and phrases they use to describe what your company does. They use the same language to search for your services online.
- Spy on Your Competitors
SpyFU is a tool you can use to check out what keywords your competitors use. While many internet marketing tools are free, unfortunately SpyFU comes with a cost. But you can use it for a month or two to gather data and then cancel your subscription.
You can generate all sorts of strategic PPC ideas, like:
- Finding low-competition areas to test against the competition
- Entering markets your competition hasn’t even considered yet
- Identifying inexpensive long-tail variations of high-converting terms
SpyFU gives you data for all three major search engines. And often, you can find great opportunities with Yahoo/Bing. Remember, everyone’s on Google.
- Use the “Opportunities” Tab in Adwords
Almost sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? To find new opportunities, just click “opportunities.”
There’s so much this tab does that you can’t list it all here. For starters, you have to run your campaign and get some data before you can do anything with this tab.
Once you have some data, you can do cool things like these:
- Learn how much you can expect to increase your profit if you increase your budget
- Adding extensions like sitelinks (which allow customizable links in your ads to promote special offers) and the call extension (add your phone number to an ad to increase clickthroughs by 6-8%)
- Get new keywords relevant to your business as searchers use different terms
You still have to be careful with the ideas that come from the “Opportunities” tab. Remember, Google needs to profit, and they’re comfortable letting you overspend a little. When you do something new, always watch your data closely to make sure you benefit from the change.
Spotting Missed PPC Opportunities Isn’t So Hard After All!
That’s nice. Because a lot of internet marketing is tough…like really tough.
But at least this part of PPC is comparatively easy.
Hope it helps!
