How to Improve Your PPC Keywords Organically

Updated January 12, 2023

A Diamond in the Rough

As you know Keywords for PPC are about quality over quantity. More isn’t always better. So if you’re looking to carry out research to try and find more keywords, remember that the number isn’t important, it’s about finding the right ones. So, if you want to improve your PPC keywords without having to pay an agency, or pay for some software, keep on reading.

This becomes more and more important as the popularity of PPC increases. As more and more businesses come to the platform, prices are rising due to the extra competition. Intelligent keyword research will have you finding cheaper or more efficient keywords before they become expensive, keeping your CTR high and your CPC down.

One way is to let searchers do the finding for you. By using broad match keywords you can see what searchers are naturally typing before they click on your ads. By checking the search terms report regularly in your AdWords account you can see the exact words typed by a searcher.

Improve your PPC Keywords

Checking this report gives you a window into the mind of your customer. It helps you identify new trends, abbreviations or slang that might be used in certain areas. You will need to regularly filter out the terms that don’t match your product (and there will be some if you’re using broad match keywords properly), so this isn’t the best tactic if you don’t have time to check your account often. Often you will realize that there’s a gap between how you talk or think about your product and how the customer does.

Another tactic is to look at your best performing keywords and try to improve upon them. On simple idea to test is changing match types. If a keyword is broad then try several variations of the broad keyword with either phrase or exact match. This can reduce the cost as while giving you a better insight into what is working.

Test, Optimize and Repeat

If you’re making changes and trying to optimize your keywords, you need to make sure you take advantage of the ‘label’ feature in AdWords. This will allow you to tag your new keywords or those that you’re testing. Without labels trying to remember what keyword is new, or which one you changed the match type on can get pretty complicated, pretty quickly.

When you’ve given you new keyword a couple of weeks you need to come back and see how it’s performing. Typically if a keyword has a low-quality score (below 6/10) or is ‘low search volume’ we will pause the keyword (unless improvements can be made to the ads or landing page to improve the quality score).

Also, when changing match types on keywords, or adding new variations, you need to make sure that there isn’t an overlap with other keywords in your account. If there is you could end up paying more for a keyword than you need to. For example, if you have the same word in an AdGroup set up as broad match, phrase match, and exact match, you need to make sure that the maximum CPC is lower for the exact match than the broad match. To ensure Google can’t pick to charge more than it should.