Keyword creation and organization are the foundations of a successful campaign. " Chuck Norris (just kidding)
There are great posts that discuss keyword research, but what comes next? How do we organize these keywords for our Adwords campaign? Can we expand on these keywords to include permutations?
Hi, I'm Troy McClure, and in the next 5 minutes, I'm going to teach you how to organize your keywords and expand on them by segmenting them into root keywords.
Root Keywords
So you are done your research and now you have a myriad of unorganized keywords either scribbled down on a piece of paper or on an unformatted excel sheet.
So what does this look like?
Let's use the example of sun protective swimwear! Here is your messy list of keywords
We see a reoccurring theme of hats (uv protective hat, spf caps, kids uva headpiece, etc) so lets start there. First we need to recognize from the keyword list that we are selling both kids and adults sun protective hats. This would justify creating 2 separate adgroups since we wouldnt want someone searching sun protective hats for men and landing on page showing sun protective hats for boys. So lets create an adgroup for Adult Sun Protective Hats and see what root keywords we can come up with!
We could go further and expand on other root keywords such as
+womens +spf (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)
+mens +spf (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)
+adults +sun (+hats, +caps, +headpieces, etc)
Organizing Keywords
Yeah Im going to have to ask youto organize these keywordsyeahthatd be great. " Bill Lumbergh
You can see that the keywords start to organize themselves once we start to expand on our root keywords. Everything is still unformatted with keywords clumped into a few cells so here is an Excel sheet that helps you organize your Adwords campaign:
Download SEM Excel Adwords Template for Small Businesses
You can use this template to keep track of keywords, keyword modifiers, adgroups, ads, and more! It will also help you organize root keywords on a per adgroup level.
Hi Chris, Check out the keyword niche finder – it does a lot of the organizational work you’re talking about – http://www.wordstream.com/keyword-niche-finder
Let me know what you think.
The spreadsheet is a nice idea but I can’t see it really being practical since it doesn’t appear to interact with Adwords. As a result, every time you make changes to your campaign – or to the spreadsheet – you have to manually update the other side.
Hi Eden. Great point. This spreadsheet is for small businesses who are getting their feet wet with Adwords before they spend money or time on 3rd party tools.