How to Find More Keywords

Many of the search terms in Yahoo! Search Marketing's network remain untapped

There are 250 million searches carried out in the UK each week. According to estimates, approximately 50 percent of all searches are commercially driven, meaning the user is seeking a specific product or service. Millions of these customers are searching on the Yahoo! Search Marketing network, but they don't always find the products and services they're looking for. This is because customers enter many variations on keywords that advertisers aren't bidding on yet. The following tips should help you find more keywords and in turn increase the number of potential customers to your site.

Bid on as many search terms as are relevant to your site. We've found that advertisers who bid on a range of relevant terms (especially 20 or more) experience the greatest success in reaching potential customers on Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Buying Cycle
A Web site attracts many potential customers who are at different stages of the buying process. This paradigm, known as the "Buying Cycle," explains why different customers who ultimately purchase the same item will search for it in a variety of ways.

The Buying Cycle has three stages. To illustrate their differences, let's assume you sell DVD players:

1. Become Informed: Users are gathering information about products, as well as the key retailers or service providers that offer the products. Searchers in this stage use more general search terms and therefore to attract them you need a small number of fairly general terms, such as "DVD."

2. Shop: Users are tracking and comparing purchase criteria such as availability, price, shipping charges, etc. Buyers in this stage reveal their preferences, so more specific keywords (for example, "Panasonic DVD") are needed to cover all possible search terms.

3. Purchase: Users show a commitment to buy through their choice of keywords. The keywords you use to attract buyers at this stage are the most specific; for example, "Panasonic DVD-RP91K black". Don't forget to bid on the name and URL of your own site to ensure that committed buyers can find you on a return visit.

It's important to select words across all three stages of the Buying Cycle, so that all types of search users can find your site.

Choose a range of search terms (both broad and narrow) that are relevant to your site. One of the best ways to start generating more keywords is to look within your own website. You want to make sure it is seen by the group of people who are most interested in what you're offering, so choose a variety of relevant terms. But, be careful - don't make your terms too broad or you may choose a search term that isn't relevant to your site (for example, we don't consider the broad search term "travel" relevant to your site if it promotes only a single resort hotel in the Lake District). Likewise, don't choose only very narrow terms - people might miss your listing. If you sell theatre in Stratford, "stratford theatre" would be perfect, but people who do not live in the Stratford area and want theatre may just type in "theatre." So, in this example, you may also wish to bid on "theatre" and other slightly broader search terms.

As you choose these, it's important to try and think like your customer, and determine what search terms they would use to find each product or service. One way of doing this is to review your internal search logs, if you offer that function on your site. This will enable you to look at the terms that visitors search for after they've arrived.

Mixing and Matching
Do you have multiple products from a single manufacturer or product line? Or do you offer products or services that vary by colour or location? Search users will potentially seek out your offerings using a multitude of phrases. For example, if you sell sports apparel, it's not enough to bid on "shirts." You'll need to scour your product database and make lists of your products, including all of the teams you have represented, all of the sports represented, all of the colours you offer, etc. Then produce different combinations from these variables to which will enable you to instantly create new, specific keywords, such as “Everton home blue football shirt", "White fitted England Rugby shirt", etc.

Helpful Tool
The Keyword Assistant is available from the Add Listings page in Manage My Accounts. Advertisers who need some help in coming up with new terms to bid on can type in a general topic and immediately review a number of related keywords, plus forecasting data and real-time bid prices for those terms. This lets you instantly see how users are searching for particular products or services.

Traps to Avoid
While we clearly advocate that our advertisers seek out more keywords to increase their customer traffic and sales, we also stress the importance of discretion in selecting new terms. Make sure your keywords are relevant to your site, so that your listings will get approval from our editors. Customers will be much more likely to spend time--and money--at your site if they immediately find what they're looking for. Also, your site credibility will be enhanced if you accurately represent your offerings in search listings. Finally, using relevant keywords will maximise your budget, because your clicks are more likely to convert to sales.

Resources
The tools that Yahoo! Search Marketing offers to help find and research keywords include the Keyword Assistant, for ideas and monthly search data, and the View Bids Tool, to check the current status of the marketplace on specific keywords.

More general information on selecting keywords may be found in our Resource Centre.