Doing PPC keyword research correctly is imperative to ensure your marketing strategy is not flushed down the toilet without delivering any return on your investment. It can also help with your SEO thinking.
In a previous article we discussed Competitive Market Analysis and how this is made easier with Keyword Spy Tool.
UPDATE
Keyword Spy Tool is the only tool you need in your arsenal to blow competitors out of the water. Below is a very quick overview of what it can do. Since this post it has considerably updated its offer. The cost is $89.95 per month but it also offers a free trial. ===> Get It Here
PPC Competitor Research
When selecting keywords to target in your marketing campaign it’s important to look at competition for these keywords. If you are interested in a particular competitor, you can login to Keyword Spy Tool and search on that domain. For this example we will use the keyword “recipe ideas” and the website MyDish.
Immediately we get quick overview of this sites performance in PPC and organic. It’s biding on 2,113 keywords via PPC and ranks in the top 20 for 627 keywords.
We can look through the site keywords and check if there are ones we should be biding on or have left out of our campaign …
We can browse through their Ad Variations and look to see how they are selling a click to their audience, plus we can see what landing page they are directing users to. This is important as you get a feeling of how they are tailoring landing pages for different ad themes.
Who are yor Competitors
But thinking who your competitors are is a lot different from knowing who your competitors are. Keyword Spy Tool allows you to quickly identify your real competitors. Searching for the keyword “recipe books” you can browse through all competitors for this keyword. The following shows results sorted by “Total Keywords”
Obviously those at the top may not be your “real” competitors. Scrolling down through the list you can quickly determine those who are in your direct market in terms of products and size.
In the space of 2 minutes you have identified competitors for this keyword and in your target market. Using the same method as we did for Mydish you can click on these and look at all keywords they are bidding on. For example clicking on CookbookPeople.com we get the following:
The metrics you get for individual keywords are as follows:
ROI- This metric is calculated by dividing the benefit of keyword by the cost of that keyword. This allows you to quickly sort a competitors keywords by ROI to get an indication of what may be performing best.
Position – This is the position of the domain for that keyword
Competitors – Is the number of people competing for that keyword.
Clicks per day - This is estimated clicks you may receive for a particular keyword. This information is taken from Google so may vary but it does give some type of indication you could expect for different keywords.
Cost / Click – This again is estimated stat of the cost you will pay for clicks.
Grabbing Competitors Research
Another great aspect for this PPC research is being able to “borrow” research carried out by your competitors. Following on from our example above. We can search all PPC keywords by the most competitive first:
We see a lot of people are bidding on “cookbook stand”, clicking on this keyword gives us a list of everyone who is bidding on this keyword.
We can export this list choosing what information should be contained in the excel spreadsheet.
Now in the following excel you can happily browse through the headlines in all the different ads for this keyword. This will allow you to identify themes. It’s a sure thing a lot of these companies have spent money figuring out what works.
This type of competitor analysis used to take AGES. Keyword Spy Tool makes it pretty easy to do all this in a matter of hours.
Related posts:
- Competitive Marketing Analysis :: Market Research :: Keyword Research
- Keyword Research – How to Win Friends and Influence People (Your Boss)
- Keyword Research – Automating the Process
- SEO Competitor Research in 5 minutes
- SEO Keyword Research – User Intent and the Opportunities
