It’s no exaggeration to say that good Keyword Research must be at the heart of all of your Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns. If you do not carry out full keyword research before your first internet marketing foray then your campaigns and, more importantly, your profitability will suffer. Without carrying out the research you will not know which keywords to use and which ones to avoid.

Keyword Research is a simple concept, but takes a lot of skill, patience and time to put into practice - partly because the research needs to be repeated to keep up with the market. In this article we are going to concentrate on how you will use the keywords in PPC. SEO Keywords are dealt with in Our Eight Part Guide To SEO.

You will use the keywords that you decide to target throughout the optimisation process. You have to choose the keywords your customers are searching on, so that the right customers will be able to find you in the search engines. Remember, that the internet is still a user-defined zone. Your customers will search for your site using the terms which they think relate to your site, and not how you want to brand your site! Use the terms that your customers use, and you’ll be able to show them what they are searching for.

So, how do you find the best terms?  

Research, research and research!  

Your own business knowledge is the best place to start. You know your business better than anyone else, and so you should be able to come up with a lot of the terms you can use. You should aim at compiling as long a list as possible. No matter how obscure you might think a term is, someone somewhere will search on it. For examples of the incredible breadth of searches carried out every day, have a look at your site’s stats package. If the package is good quality, you should be able to see the full list of keyword searches that led people to your site. I guarantee you there will be some searches there you never dreamt of, and yet the stats show that someone came to your site using precisely these terms.

Next, pick the brains of your friends and family. What keywords would they type into a search engine if they were searching for your product or service? Take the question the other way, and ask them what else your keywords suggest to them. You might find it useful to see what associations other people derive from your keywords.

There are many different tools available online for researching keywords; each of which will give you a different perspective on which words and phrases will work for you. One of the most useful places to go for information is the Overture suggestion tool. This shows you how many searches have been carried out for a particular keyword or keyphrase in the previous month. As with your own site’s statistics, you will be amazed at how many users are typing in seemingly obscure keywords. The downside is that this only covers the sites and engines fed data by Yahoo!, which is currently minimal compared with the reach of Google.

Let your competition help you get ideas. Look at the words used by competitive sites in the titles and headings. You can use KEI tools to evaluate the keyword density on these sites and see what words and phrases they are optimised for.

Use as many keyword sources as you can, and combine them all to find the keywords that will bring more business to your site. This masterlist of keywords will become one of your most valuable assets.

Now you can run your PPC campaigns (UK Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MIVA are the most important, with Microsoft AdCenter pending) knowing exactly what key phrases to target to bring higher-converting traffic to your site. Remember to use all of the terms that you have compiled. 

That’s not quite the end of the story. Markets change, PPC prices rise and fall, particular phrases gain currency or fade from memory, competitors move into a particular niche or drop out of the PPC battle for a particular keyword.

In light of this, we recommend that you carry out fresh keyword research as frequently as possible. Exactly how frequently you should carry this out depends upon your business and your industry, but for most companies we recommend fresh research once a season to keep abreast of developments in your industry. If you see that new terms have gained in popularity, or if once profitable terms are sending you smaller numbers of visitors, then you can take advantage of the speed and flexibility of internet marketing, and change the spend levels on your PPC campaigns with immediate effect.