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Building Your PPC Keyword List | 
While your ads, landing pages and your offer are all important factors, it is your keyword list that will make or break a Pay Per Click campaign.
Unless your goal is branding, when building a PPC keyword list you are wanting the terms with the best ROI so you need to find the phrases used by your potential customer when they are at the end of their search journey rather than travelling along it.
For example, the term ‘offshore banking’ is searched for about 60,000 a month and would cost you around £3.50 per click.
These searchers though are at the beginning of their search cycle. They are looking for information such as how offshore banking works, is it safe, where is the best place etc. These are questions they may not have even thought of yet but they will be seeking answers to them soon enough as they drift from site to site soaking up all the info.
Of course, with 60,000 seeing the ad for your bank here on the Isle of Man there is always a chance of grabbing a few customers but chances are most clicks on your ad will not result in the required action.
There are about 500 searchers a month for ‘offshore banking isle of man’ but these searchers are at or close to the end of their search cycle and are ready to commit. They’ve done their research and they have decided the Isle of Man is the place to put their money. All that’s left is for you to convince them your bank is the best for their purposes.
These will be far easier to convert and we know this is correct because the term ‘offshore banking isle of man’ costs over £5 a click. Competition for the term is fierce because of the high conversion rate.
Take it a step further and a term like ‘internet offshore banking isle of man’ may only get a hundred or so searches a month but you would expect to convert a high percentage of those with the correct ad, landing page and offer because it is such a highly targeted phrase.
A PPC keyword list made up of 600 similar terms to the one above would bring the same amount of traffic as bidding on the single term ‘offshore banking’ but would result in far more conversions.
Building a PPC keyword list of 600 or more can be daunting but with our experience we can quickly put one together for you made up of nothing but ‘buying’ terms used at the end of the search cycle of your particular market.
Completely agree, long-tail keyword research may take a bit of effort but they present a great opportunity to write highly tailored ads and take users to a relevant landing pages. Lower CPCs, higher CTR and higher conversion rates makes any time spent researching hundreds of long-tails more than worthwhile.