Keyword List Refining – Finding Out the Keywords that Bring Revenue

Keywords are one of the most important data for an online marketer. Keywords find its way through PPC Ads, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing. Keywords are not just vague words to be used in the marketing. They are the words and phrases that run inside the minds of prospects and customers. That’s the language they use to describe what they want and need.

It is important for us, digital marketers, to speak the same language in our marketing materials so that it “rings a bell” when our prospects come across marketing material with that language.

With the latest automation tools, it is easy to generate a big list of keywords. One of the most used, most talked about and authoritative tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool, as you may already know, helps you generate keyword ideas from existing keywords, or with URLs.

Why Keyword List Refining?

Keyword generation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an online marketing strategy and work flow. While it is VERY easy to generate a big list of keywords, it is challenging to find out which keywords convert well and bring revenue and profits to the business.

This is important because low performing keywords are eating into the marketing budget all the time and without scavenging such low performing keywords, it will be VERY difficult to increase the ROI of a digital marketing campaign.

Some keywords bring in more traffic because they have a high search volume. Some keywords bring in little to no traffic. Some keywords get a high click through rate and some do not. But search volume, traffic and CTR doesn’t always mean higher revenue for a particular business.

For example, “free diet ebook” may have a high search volume and hence bring in a lot of traffic. But if the business is offering a premium weight loss subscription program, this keyword will convert at a very low percentage – probably 0.1% or less.

What we need to find out from our exhaustive keyword list is the keywords that are highly targeted convert well. This process is called keyword refining.

Even if a keyword is searched for only 200 times a month, it may have a very high conversion ratio. A lot of such high quality but low traffic keywords can together bring a great revenue for a particular business than a few high search volume keywords.

Such gems of keywords are hard to find, but once they are unearthed, it becomes an asset and can bring consistent and long term results. Also, since it is difficult to find out such keywords, it bid on those keywords and the competition may be a little less than the mainstream keywords.

How to Refine Your Keyword List and Weed Out Non-Performers

If you have not setup conversion tracking for your website and sales page, it is high time that you implement it. What you measure can be improved. If you don’t measure it, there is no way to improve it. Conversion tracking will help you to determine which keywords actually convert into sales.

If you are running a PPC campaign in AdWords, you can find out which keywords convert by setting up conversion tracking. You just have to switch on conversion tracking and place a code in your landing page or thank you page that people reach when they finish making the payment for your product or service.

After you run the campaign, or while the campaign is running, you can find out the keywords from which sales have happened.

You may be surprised to find out that some keywords get a lot of traffic but do not convert into sales. And some keywords will have low clicks and impressions but they will convert into sales.

Capitalize on High Converting Keywords

These are the keywords that you should be focusing on not just for PPC, but for SEO and social media as well.

Such low volume, low traffic but high converting keywords will have low competition most of the time and you can do content marketing with focus on those keywords. So instead of paying for that traffic every time, you can get free traffic from the search engines and funnel them into your sales page through your content website.

I hope you got some new ideas from this post. Leave a comment and tell me what’s on your mind…