The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of the toughest challenges facing pay-per-click marketers is keyword expansion. As competition increases, intelligent PPC marketers realize that it is imperative to not only build out long keyword lists, but to also "widen" those same keyword lists. What do I mean by “widen?” Let's take the example of "dog training": Traditional keyword tools suggest that you include terms like:

• dog training
• dog training tips
• dog obedience training

In general, these potentially useful keywords speak directly to your target audience’s needs. But these are also keywords that are most likely to be bid on by your competitors. What if we dissected this keyword list and expanded on the term "dog"? Think about how many breeds of dog exist: Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, Beagles etc. Now, lets replace the word “dog” with specific breeds: "dog training" and "training a dog" become "Golden Retriever training" or "training a Golden Retriever." By incorporating breeds and replacing the term "dog," we were able to exponentially increase the size of our keyword list.

Some Simple Math To Consider

If you choose to focus on 10 dog breeds and combine those with 50 seed dog-training keywords, the result would be 550 unique keywords!10 unique dog breeds * 50 seed keywords = 500 + 50 original seed keywords (Total of 550 keywords.) Additionally, the new breed keywords probably have less competition, and are much more likely to convert with a targeted landing page (a topic for another time).

How Do I Identify These Types Of Elements? Google Sets and Google Squared are amazing free tools that will allow you to quickly identify elements of a set. Here are examples of both in action:

To summarize, basic keyword tools are excellent for exploring generic topics and developing a set of keyword permutations. However, in order to differentiate your keyword list, and to avoid complete reliance on highly competitive keywords, I encourage all PPC marketers take steps to widen their keyword lists by utilizing Google Sets and Google Squared. This approach will increase the likelihood that you will find less competitive, and more targeted keywords that ultimately produce conversions at more cost-effective rates.

Tony Soric is now writing for Search Engine Land. Click here to read his full article.

Tony Soric, Clickable SEM Guru

 Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

This is a really interesting article

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We recently asked Clickable prospects and customers: "Which keyword generation tool do you find

We recently asked Clickable prospects and customers: "Which keyword generation tool do you find