Paid Search

How to Grow Your Keyword List through Keyword Farming Christine Churchill , KeyRelevance.com - Jan 17, 2012

Growing and refining your keywords is a recurring task in paid per click advertising. In this article, I am going to explore an often-underexploited approach that I call Keyword Farming. It uses a brief Google AdWords campaign to help expand your keyword list for you by allowing you to leverage the User Search Query Report within AdWords to find the specific phrases people are actually using to search for products or services.

Keyword Farming Basics

An advertiser doesn't have to spend a large budget or to run the campaign for a long time to gather keyword information. The Keyword Farming approach is to run a cost-limited campaign using generic root terms with the goal of collecting search query information. Then use the actual search queries to expand the keyword list. The search queries also provide a way to help you build out a negative keyword list by discovering non-relevant phrases.

As you grow your keyword list, you can replant expanded keywords into mainstream campaigns. Let's walk through the steps in more detail.

Plant the Garden

The first step in Keyword Farming is to set up a new AdWords campaign and seed it with root phrases. I prefer to start with short relevant phrases in Phrase Match. Keep the bids very low, but high enough for first page position. The goal here is to get impressions, but not necessarily clicks. The first page bid keeps impression counts high enough to gather good keyword data more quickly.

Be sure to use PPC best practices in setting up the campaign, so make sure you have good campaign setup, ad copy, landing page, etc. -- just like a "real" campaign. Keep the budget fairly low to save cash. Remember, the goal in this campaign is keyword impression data and the corresponding search queries that generated the impressions.

Let it Grow

Once you've set up the campaign, activate it and let it run until you've generated at least 1,000 impressions. Be sure to perform periodic "weed control" as you go. Note that the User Search Query Report requires 24 hours or more before the data is available.

Weed Control

The basic weed control in keyword farming is to look for off-topic terms in the User Search Query Report. If you see them, then add them (or a subphrase) to the negative keyword list for the farming campaign (and other campaigns as appropriate). As with gardening, early intervention on weeds will limit their damage. In this case, pruning out mismatched terms by adding negative terms will prevent wasting impressions, clicks, and dollars on inappropriate terms.

Harvest Time

After collecting 1,000 impressions or so, the User Search Query Report should indicate a number of more popular search phrases. You can then extract a list of these search queries and export them. If the data is collected very quickly, you might reach your impression goal in just a day or two. If so, you can pause the Keyword Farming campaign and then wait a couple of days until all of the User Search Query Report data is available.

Replanting

Take the list of harvested phrases and seed them back into to new/existing campaigns in your PPC account. You might also consider also targeting some of these phrases for organic SEO.

Why use Keyword Farming Instead of the Keyword Report from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics shows which search terms that are driving clicks to your site, but does not indicate phrases that are not generating clicks. From an organic SEO standpoint, you might not rank for the search phrase, and from a PPC standpoint you might either not be bidding competitively or your ad copy is not effective or persuasive.

The User Search Query Report generates data earlier in the visitor's search process, rather than waiting for them to come to your site. Thus you can find new opportunities to reach out to prospective customers. In some cases the User Search Query Report can provide insights into new products your company may not already provide but searchers are looking for.

Why Not Just Use the Keyword Research Tools Provided in AdWords?

The keyword tools provide useful information, but Keyword Farming provides information specific to your audience (tailored to your geo-targeting, day-parting, etc.) Keyword Farming is more work -- gardening is not without effort, after all -- and it is a better keyword-expansion tool than an initial keyword-generation tool. Utilizing this technique, however, can help you to locate and nurture some effective keyword terms that you might otherwise not have considered.

Christine Churchill is the President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service Dallas search engine marketing company that specializes in helping businesses succeed online. Christine and her experienced team of online marketers provide a holistic approach to marketing: increasing a site's visibility online, improving the user experience on the site, and maximizing the site's conversion potential.