Matching Options

When running an Adwords campaign, you are able to and should define when your keywords will come out in search results. To do this, you can select matching options for each of your keywords to either reach a broad audience or target a niche.

The Google Adwords program allows you to select four matching options:

Broad Match

Broad match is the default adjusting for an Adwords campaign. Broad match means your ad will come out in search results when any compounding of the words in your keyword phrase are used in a search. Many an adman has learned expensive lessons using this setting. Let’s look at an example.

Assume I am selling travel writing diaries and using “travel journals” as my keyword phrase. Any time a person enters any combination of “travel” and “journals” in a search, my ad will appear. The ad will also appear for plurals and relevant variations. While this may sound great at first sight, a broad match setting can result in low quality hits and poor conversion rates. A person searching for travel journal stories is going to see my link. While a decent percentage will click my link, they are far less likely to buy because they are just browsing. Using broad match, my costs go up and my conversions go down.

Broad match Is not necessarily a bad option. If your product makes a popular Christmas gift, you definitely want to use the broad match option in November and December. You prospective clients will be motivated to buy. Even the “browsing” surfers will convert well.

Phrase Match

Phrase match is a matching option that gives you a bit more control over your ads. Phrase match tells the Adwords platform to only show your ad when a search is conducted for the particular order of your keyword phrase. Using the phrase match option for “travel journals”, my ad would appear when someone searches for a phrase with “travel journals” in it, but not “journals travel”. To use phrase match, you simply place quotation marks around the keyword phrase.

Exact Match

Exact match is…exact match. It is the most targeted option. You should use it only if you want your ad to appear in searches for the exact keyword phrase as written. For instance, if I want my ad to appear in searches for “travel journals” and nothing else, I will use exact match. To select the exact match option, simply place brackets (“[]”) around the keyword phrase.

Negative Match

No, the negative match option doesn’t involve cussing, insults or adult sites. Instead, it allows you to designate which keyword phrase search results you do not want to appear in. For example, I may not want my travel journal product to appear in search results for “Amazon travel journals”. I would simply list the keyword phrase with a dash (-) in front of it and my ad will not appear. The negative match option is a tremendous way to eliminate junk traffic from your Adwords campaign.

The Google Adwords platform is a tremendous advertising platform. Effectively manipulate your keywords and it can be a highly profitable one as well.

How do the SEs find my articles and pick keywords?

Search engines read your site and link to your articles based on the keywords present in the articles, so before you start writing your article make a list of the keywords you want to target. If you have a website based on African Safaris, your list may look something like this:

African
Safaris
Vacation
Honeymoon

Choosing the right keywords can be difficult because people, not machines are the ones searching for the keywords in your articles. You can overcome this by using SEO tools that provide sample keywords for different phrases and common search terms. Most importantly, write as many articles as possible. An article on African Safaris focusing on American tourists would have different keywords than one focusing on European tourists. Another variant would be an article focusing on first-time visitors to Africa, and even another article on those who have visited before and plan to go back a second or third time. This ensures that everyone looking for information on African Safaris finds your articles and your website.

You should try to focus on 3-5 keywords in each article. If you choose too many or too few keywords, the article can become difficult to read and not effective. Once you determine your keywords, you can look then focus on the density of your keywords. Keyword density refers to how often you use the keywords in your article. Aim for one
keyword used in every three sentences. This makes search engines see your article well, and makes them easy to read by humans as well.

How long should I make an SEO Article?

The length of an SEO article can vary, but most articles are about 500 words in length. Articles can be shorter of longer, depending on what you plan to use them for. A blog entry would need to be shorter, around 100 words, while a long story could be as long as 2000 words. For general website promotion, try to have several shorter articles
instead of one long one. This creates the appearance of more pages on your site, and also creates more links to your site in the search engines. If you must have a long article, try to break it up over several pages so that the multiple pages are generated in your sitemap for the search engines.

Varying your keywords can lead to higher search engine rankings for your articles. Instead of an article with the keywords ‘african’ and ’safari’ everywhere, create a second article with ‘africans’ and ’safaris’. This will ensure that no matter what search terms people use, your article will be high on their search results list. You can
also use variants of your keywords in the same article – this may even come naturally as you write the article since we write in normal speech patterns.

And finally, be sure to use proper spelling and grammar while writing SEO articles. Making sure the articles are easy to read can lead to links to your articles, giving you even more exposure.