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Keyword research is one of two very important steps in pay-per-click advertising.
Most advertisers come up with variants of the same keyword. And that is because common keyword research tools accept a single seed keyword idea and then show you several derivatives that you might consider for your PPC campaigns.
However, unfortunately, those suggestions are only a means of going deeper in finding keywords. For example, if you typed as your seed keyword:
“mlm training”
Here are some suggestions from the popular Google External Keyword Tool:
mlm training article
mlm training tool
mlm training resource
mlm training materials
mlm training material
mlm training system
best mlm training
in mlm topic training
mlm training eBook
While these are excellent suggestions, the seed keyphrase is repeated in all of them as a substring. In PPC we call this going deep and such phrases are perfect for expanding an existing working keyword and increasing your CTR.
But we want more ideas. Our target market are not necessarily searching for training by typing “mlm training” into the search. Isn’t it possible that they are looking for a specific training product by name? Or perhaps they’re looking for their favourite network marketing leader instead.
Advertisers wanting these variations have to think of them by themselves before typing them as a seed into the Google Keyword Tool. And unfortunately most people i’ve worked with don’t have the imagination or a thorough enough knowledge of their market to think of the variations on their own.
Which means that anyone who can come up with less obvious buyer keywords has an advantage against all the competition. To get those cheaper cost clicks with little to no competition, we have to come up with unique keywords that include not only the seed keyword idea, but also all the synonyms, related words, and collocations.
Collocation dictionaries exist for the English language. These use large samples of text to find words that appear in close proximity of the main word in question. For example, a collocation dictionary would provide for the seed phrase “real estate” the following: “property”, “agent”, “investment”, “rental property”, “mortgage”, and “bank loan”.
As you can see, from the keyword list above, a deep keyword research tool would not provide all of these alternatives.
Tools such KWBrowse and Google Wonder Wheel are popular free tools that can give you common collocations found on the web as well as related words and synonyms. In PPC, we call this approach “going wide” because it sweeps all the vocabulary used in a market. Giving you a larger variety of less competitive phrases to go after in your PPC advertising. Lateral keyword tools provide this functionality.
For example, here are some suggestions from Google Wonder Wheel for the keyword “MLM training”:
dani johnson
mlm trainer
mlm recruiting
mlm leads
mlm business
mlm success
What makes lateral keyword tools even more useful is that you can then click on any suggestion to get collocations of the suggestion. For example, suppose you’re creating a new campaign around the term “MLM trainer” chosen from the Wonder Wheel’s suggestions. Here’re some of the ideas you’ll see:
tim sales mlm
mlm the truth
jim rohn
john milton
personal coaching
You’ll notice that now you have the names of some gurus in the “MLM trainer” market. A normal keyword research tool would not have shown you these suggestions. And now you’ve got a new idea for targeting search strings.
My strategy is to take these names of gurus and expand the list further by searching in Google or Wikipedia for the names of other MLM trainers.
I could then choose to expand on “tim sales” and discover the names of some of his products. Which is another idea for more keyword groups.
So as you can see, using lateral keyword tools like the Google Wonder Wheel in the above example or KWBrowse allows you to access a much wider spectrum of ideas that you can include in your PPC campaigns and avoid the typical $10+ click costs.