Create a Keyword Strategy to Reach Users

Identifying the search terms users might employ to find your business is crucial for preparing an effective keyword strategy. This ensures that relevant ads are served when consumers search for products or services like yours.

Building an Effective Keyword Strategy

Consumers use a variety of word combinations to describe what they need. These search terms lead to different search results. For example, if Linda works for a company selling sneakers, she might use “running shoes” as a keyword in her Google Ads campaign. When someone searches for “running shoes” on Google, several factors determine whether her ad appears.

Keyword Match Types

Using different keyword match types is a vital part of your strategy:

• Exact match: [tennis shoes]
• Phrase match: “tennis shoes”
• Broad match: tennis shoes

All positive keyword match types can match close variants, which are similar but not identical variations of a keyword. This includes misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, abbreviations, and accents.

Switching to a Broad Match Strategy

Broad match keywords cover all queries of narrower match types and more, using Google AI to match search queries that exact and phrase match keywords would have matched to. There are various ways to transition to a broad match strategy, from standard testing solutions to more customized setups.

Apply Recommendations Automatically

You control which recommendations to apply regularly. Choose from two bundles:

• Grow your business: Optimizes targets and improves ad performance.
• Maintain your ads: Keeps campaigns up-to-date with best practices.

Steps to Create Your Keyword Strategy

1. From the Overview page, select “Audiences, keywords, and content,” then “Search Keywords.”
2. Select the plus button and choose the Campaign and Ad group to add keywords to.
3. Enter your keywords or use the Keyword Planner for keyword discovery and traffic estimation.

Best Practices

• Think like your audience: Consider all terms a potential user might use.
• Organize keywords by theme: Group keywords to manage and maintain your account efficiently.
• Use the Search Terms Report: Identify queries that triggered your ads.
• Use negative keywords: Prevent irrelevant queries from triggering your ads.

Key Takeaways

1. Google Ads Search campaigns use multiple keyword types to reach known and unknown queries.
2. Add keywords to ad groups in themes and match types based on business goals.
3. Optimize keyword performance using negative keywords, the Search Terms Report, and optimization score recommendations.