PPC Affiliate Keywords – Going Wide Instead of Deep

It seems like a daily ritual: a client calls me wanting assistance with his SEO initiatives and asks me what keywords he or she should optimize. I, of course, appreciate the vote of confidence, but I’m not his SEO consultant. Which brings up a good question – what are the best keywords?

This same question comes up as a PPC Affiliate Marketer. You start a campaign and now need to generate an Adwords keyword list to send traffic to your landing pages. This can be tricky, as many newbie affiliates loose their shirts in PPC, because they THINK they have a great keyword list when in fact, it’s too deep, and not wide enough.

One of the 1st things Amit teaches in his affiliate training is that effective keyword research is one of the most important skill sets you’ll need to develop as an Affiliate, especially if you are to reach Super Affiliate status. So lets go over going Deep vs. Wide.

Suppose you’re a newbie affiliate, promoting a hypothetical virtual car dealer. You know nothing about cars, so you head over to wordtracker to come up with a bunch of keywords to bid on Google.

Your “thorough” list includes all the fathomable keywords with the root “car”. So you take your list thinking you’ll make a killing, only to find out you generated very litle traffic and consequently zero commissions. Here’s why: When you are searching for a “car” on google, more than likely you won’t include the word “car” as part of your keyword, but probably will use sports sedan, convertible coupe, Lexus IS250, Cadillac Escalade, SUV, etc. These are descriptive or synonimous keywords (as Amit describes them) that people will search for. That’s the difference between going deep vs. going wide. So always go wide first. When when you find which of these keywords provide the best traffic, THEN go deep.

I have this conversation multiple times each day with clients. Hmm, maybe I am their SEO consultant.

I need to charge more…