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4 Tips for Choosing Keywords for Your Google AdWords Campaign

Creating an effective Google AdWords campaign for a nonprofit organization can be tricky. After all, it’s not many people that are online and googling “who can I give my money to?”

One of the trickiest things about choosing keywords for your Google AdWords Campaigns is that you can only guess at the intent behind someone’s searching. For example, a nonprofit that raises money to help prevent cardiovascular disease might think that a good keyword phrase would be “heart health.”

But “heart health” could be searched for dozens of different reasons. A journalist could be searching it to find statistics, a cardiologist could be searching it to find news updates, a fitness instructor could be searching it to find cardio exercises…you get the picture.

So how do you make sure to pick the keywords that are right for you? Here are four tips to help you make your selections.

1. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes.

First, start by defining who it is that you want to reach. In the above example, do you want to reach people who are interested in learning more about heart health, people who have heart issues, people who donate to other cardiovascular heart organizations, or another group?

Next, think carefully about the people you want to reach. If you were one of them, what would you be searching for? What information or resources would you be trying to find, and what terms would you use to find them?

2. Choose keywords that are closely related to your landing page.

Your landing page—the page people will reach when they click through your ad—should drive both the AdWords ad copy that you create and the keywords you choose. The more specific and closely related your ads are to that particular landing page, the better your ads will tend to perform.

Keyword specificity has several big bonuses: First, it’s generally cheaper to bid on words/phrases that are more specific versus words/phrases that are more general. Second, it’s more likely that someone searching for a more specific keyword set will be interested in your page when your page closely relates to those terms. Third, if Google sees that your page is very relevant for that phrase, it’s likely to show your ad more often to people searching that phrase.

3. Use the keyword suggestion tool.

Google has a lot of built-in tools that can be hard to find unless you know to look for them. One of these is its keyword suggestion tool. All you have to do is input keywords that you think are highly relevant for your page/ad and Google will suggest others you might want to consider.

Now, not all of these are going to be completely relevant to your organization or your landing page. (Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Google can’t actually read your mind. Yet.) But there are likely to be some great keyword ideas in there, and perhaps some that will spark some keyword ideas of your own.

4. Look at your metrics!

What’s the best judge of which keywords are best? Look to see which ones are performing best! Look to see which terms are getting regularly searched, and look to see how often your ads for those keywords are clicked on.

A high search rate with a low click rate could mean that your keywords and ad are poorly matched, or that people who are searching for that keyword don’t feel that they’ll find the information they want when they click on your ads.

How do you know which it is? Test! Luckily, Google makes it easy to switch up ads and keywords in mere moments. Just be sure you make note of the thinking behind each of your tests—otherwise you’ll end up with results, and you won’t know what they mean.

Do you have more questions about Google Adwords (or about Firefly Partners)? We’d love to chat with you about how to make your campaigns successful and drive the right traffic to your site. Reach out to us here.

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