Now that you’ve set up your search engine marketing campaign and it’s chugging along nicely, how do you take things to the next level? You’ve picked out some good keywords, written some good copy and you’re getting a reasonable ROI, but every time you look at your pay-per-click campaigns, you just know there’s more that you could be doing to maximize your investment. And you know what? You’re right.

The next step is to start prospecting for keywords that are lower in price but still bring good results. Anyone can set up a keyword campaign with all the obvious keywords and spend a bunch of money. Smart marketers know, however, that one of the best ways to beat their competition is to go after those keywords that the competition hasn’t discovered yet. More than 500 million keywords are searched every month on the major search engines, yet only 15 to 20 percent of those keywords have bids. A veritable gold rush of keywords is just waiting to happen.

Admittedly those keywords will have lower volumes of search than all of the one-word and two-word options you are currently bidding on, but the conversion rates will be higher, and by spreading your budget over a larger number of words, you minimize your monetary risk.

The Mining Process

You’ll want to utilize two methods in the mining process. One involves brainstorming, the other research, but good keyword development strategies take advantage of both.

For the first, find yourself a big blank wall and a stack of sticky notes. You’re going to use this wall to start the brainstorming process, but don’t do this alone or, even worse, with your marketing team. You are too close to your website to be objective. You’ve watched its growth and development since it was nothing more than a twinkle in the designer’s eye, and although you may try to think like your customer, nine times out of 10 you will fail to consider all the different ways someone might search for your product or service.

People search in very random ways. Most of them don’t know all the buzzwords, jargon and abbreviations associated with your business, so they don’t use them. Your marketing team may be in the habit of trying to influence your customers to behave in certain ways on your site. Many marketing teams are great at this, but their influence doesn’t extend to the way people are accustomed to searching. They are going to search their way no matter what you think, so your job is to figure out their thought process and put your website in front of them.

The best thing you can do is conduct your own informal focus group. Gather a bunch of your friends, associates, relatives and others, and sit them down in front of that blank wall. Feed them (if that’s the only way you can get them), but try to get folks who know little or nothing about your business. Tell them, “I sell widgets. If you were looking for widgets online, what would you enter into a search engine?” Then get ready to write each keyword on a sticky note as fast as you can. The reason you will want to use sticky notes is that once you have all the keywords written down, it is easy to move them around to create “buckets.” These buckets usually correspond to specific products, price and volume. Once you have those buckets, you can easily set up your categories in Yahoo and your Adgroups in Google. Having these buckets established will also allow you to write relevant titles and descriptions for each, thus minimizing the amount of time spent copywriting.

The second step in the keyword mining process involves using tools to dig for more variations on your keyword bucket themes. You can take all the words your focus group has suggested and use them to expand your lists by plugging them into such keyword research tools as:

  • Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch)
  • Google AdWords Keyword Tool (ad words.google.com/select/)
  • KeywordSandbox (https://adwords.google.com/select/ KeywordSandbox)
  • Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com)
  • KeywordMax (www.keywordmax.com)
  • Keyword Intelligence (www.keyword intelligence.com)

Taking It to the Next Level

While brainstorming and research are crucial to the keyword prospecting process, they are much more effective when combined with other techniques. Take advantage of all the tools and advice available to make your site a veritable gold mine. Here are some time-tested ideas that have worked for me.

Add an internal search engine to your site. This will give you tons of information on how users are finding you. It will also let you know whether users are finding what they want when they get to your site. A good search engine tool can be found at www.freefind.com, or you can find many others by typing “open source search engine” into any search engine. You will want one that just searches your site rather than searching the whole Web, as you obviously don’t want to encourage users to leave your site as soon as they get there.

Check out the source code on your competitors’ sites. You may be able to get ideas for your brainstorming process from some of the keywords they are focusing on. Remember, it’s not a good idea to use the same keywords unless you offer the same product or service, but it’s a good place to start looking for ideas.

Consider your entire website. Many folks stop their keyword research on their home page. They don’t know that their internal pages can provide a wealth of new keywords to attack.

Look for all related words. Make sure you include all variations of a term. Choose words that are singular, plural, misspellings, abbreviations, etc.

As you mine, remember that a “keyword” is not just one or two words. Many keywords are now three, four, five or more words in length – these are the keywords that are producing higher ROI with less investment.

Internet users are becoming more sophisticated in how they search and are utilizing longer keyword phrases to find what they need. Marketers, fortunately for you, aren’t keeping pace with this trend, and that’s what’s driving the prices so high on the one-word and two-word search terms. By thinking a little more creatively, and pursuing more of those niche terms, you can compete very effectively against the big keyword mining companies. After all, a little bit of gold from a lot of rocks is worth just as much as one big nugget. You may have to work harder to get it, but in the end, a gold baron is a gold baron, regardless of how he made his wealth.

MARY O’BRIEN is a partner at Telic Media. She was formerly senior director of sales at Yahoo Search Marketing and is currently presenting their advertiser workshops around the country.