Keyword Creation Done Quickly

By Ryan Savaiano, Paid Search Coordinator, Advertising Solutions

Whether it’s been for a tight deadline, a quick forecast or even a last minute request, we’ve all needed to build out a list of keywords in a hurry. There are a plethora of tools and resources available to aid in the process of building out these lists, but I just wanted to offer a few sources and tips that I tend to rely on when I need a pretty substantial catalog of terms rather quickly.

Thesaurus: It’s a no brainer that to start off a build, you’re going to at least have a few core terms or a theme to which you’re going to be building around. I find a thesaurus to be extremely helpful when looking for different variations of certain words. This will help you get a start on expanding your base foundation. It will also give you ideas on what type of language different users may use. Living in the digital age, I tend to rely more on the thesaurus functions within Microsoft Word or even Outlook rather than a physical one.

Your Website: Content within your website or landing page is also a great way to gather ideas for certain keywords you might want to run on. Scan the page for key terms or phrases that consumers might be likely to search on. These will not only help expand your list, but will also help give an added boost to your quality score since they will be highly relevant to the landing page.

Keyword Discovery: Keyword Discovery has been a tool that I’ve relied on for quite some time. Boasting a catalog of over 4.4 billion keyword searches based on user panel data, their Global Premium database will return a variety of queries along with the number of times each term has been searched on by their panel. As with most keyword suggestion services, these figures should be looked at directionally rather than as absolute numbers. I find the service most helpful in discovering different modifiers that can easily take you from a list of ten keywords to a list of over a hundred. It’s also a great source for finding various negatives you might want to add to your account for better targeting.

Concatenate, concatenate, concatenate: Probably one of my favorite and most heavily relied on formulas within Excel is the concatenation function. It is a life saver when it comes to putting together a list of variates in a hurry. Simply enter the formula =CONCATENATE(cell#1,” “,cell#2) and drag down.

Google’s Keyword Tool: I normally turn to Google’s keyword tool at the end of my build, mainly due to it’s propensity for suggesting very broad or general terms. I tend to use it more for quality assurance purposes, making sure there aren’t any holes in my keyword list, but it can be useful for suggesting terms that you may have missed or haven’t thought of up until that point.

Using these various tools and sources, I’ve been able to create keyword lists of sometimes over 1,000 terms in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Now I understand that there are many more tools and services out there and that each advertiser may have his or her own way of building out these lists and that’s great. I think you should use whatever you feel most comfortable with. I just wanted to offer a few basic suggestions that I find helpful when I’ve needed to have a pretty sizable list of terms and needed them yesterday. Hopefully you’ll find some of these tips helpful and be able to utilize them on future builds.

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