Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Making Your SEO Smarter with AdWords

Here's a nightmare scenario that AdWords can help you avoid: You spend six months of time and effort to get to the top position for your favorite keyword, and it turns out that the keyword doesn't generate sales.

AdWords research can help you find the right keywords, craft the most effective listings, and make sure your website is ready to take advantage of the SEO traffic when it starts flowing in.

The right keywords

The “right” keywords are simply those that deliver sufficient prospects who respond favorably to your offer. Keyword research tools can only estimate the amount of traffic a given keyword will generate on a national level, and can't even do that for regions like metro areas, cities, or neighborhoods. And no keyword tool can predict the nature or quality of that traffic. The history of SEO is littered with cases where a company aggressively slogged its way to top position for a high-volume keyword only to discover that the keyword delivered lots of worthless traffic to the website.

In Chapter 4, we show you how to set up an AdWords campaign for the sole purpose of keyword validation. Using the impression share metric as a multiplier, you can determine precisely the traffic volume of exact match keywords. And by running multiple ads, you can assess which messages resonate most powerfully with those searchers. After you set up conversion tracking on your own site, you can see which keywords generate not just the most impressions and ...