Keyword discovery is a powerful, driving force in in the success or failure of a paid search marketing campaign.There’s more to effective pay per click (PPC) than just bidding on the right keywords. To be competitive and generate new revenue opportunities, you need to find new, profitable, traffic-driving keywords every day.Simply conducting traditional keyword research isn’t enough. Search marketers need to actively practice keyword discovery and establish a system that provides a constant stream of new and proven keywords.
Why is Keyword Discovery so Critical to PPC?
With new websites, marketers perform traditional keyword research to launch their PPC campaign. However, to keep competitive and continually evolve in paid search, marketers must constantly analyze their campaigns in order to achieve peak perform. And discovering new keyword opportunities is no exception.
If the keywords in your PPC campaign remain static, so will your conversions. Constantly engaging in aggressive keyword discovery results in:
- Expanding into previously untapped search verticals
- Finding new, proven keywords with a lower cost-per-click
- Improving your overall ROI
In the following sections, we’ll cover these three factors in more detail and discuss how to best implement effective keyword discovery for your paid search efforts.
Use Keyword Discovery to Explore New Search Verticals
One of the goals of search marketer is to find new customers. The way to find these new customers using paid search is to constantly expand your efforts and push your message into new search verticals.
In order to successfully tap into these new channels, you must discover new keywords to target and create new ad campaigns around them. Doing so will expose your company to a wider market by broadening your reach, which will help attract new customers.
Keyword Discovery Helps You Find Cheaper, ‘Long Tail’ Keywords
Long tail marketing is a strategy of targeting visitors who are searching on less frequent, less general queries. What’s important to know about long tail keywords is they often produce the majority of searches and traffic for a website. Even better, long tail keywords are usually cheaper than more competitive “head” terms.Using a system of constantly discovering new keywords, marketers can effectively mine the long tail of search and uncover new, long tail keywords to build ad campaigns around.
Discovering New Keywords is a Sure-Fire Formula for Better ROI
By continuously exploring new verticals and creating new, highly-relevant ad campaigns around cheaper, long tail keywords, your PPC efforts will enjoy better click-through rates (CTR) on cheaper, long tail keywords.In Google AdWords, higher CTR boosts your keyword Quality Score: a calculation of relevancy to a user’s query. This boost in Quality Score translates into having to bid less on keywords in return for maximum ad exposure and impression share, leading to improved return on investment.
How to Effectively Discover New Keyword Opportunities for PPC
There are many ways to discover new keyword opportunities for your pay per click marketing efforts. Some of the most popular methods include:
- Brainstorming
- Inspecting competitor sites
- Third party keyword tools
These are all common approaches, but they each have their flaws because they may or may not produce keywords that are relevant to your website and/or proven to drive traffic and conversions.For my money, the most reliable way to perform truly effective keyword discovery is to research your own log files or analytics for search queries that have already produced clicks. With this data, you can uncover keywords that are proven to elicit desired actions, like traffic and conversions. 
You know this because you have proof from your analytics that these keywords work. And chances are they’ll work again.So the best practice for your PPC efforts to continue to evolve is to leverage this data and implement new, targeted campaigns around these new keywords, which includes creating relevant ad text and highly-optimized landing pages.By doing this, you’re allowing keyword discovery to work for you and help explore new search verticals with cheaper long tail keywords, target new potential customers and improve your paid search ROI.
