Main keyword a strategy for content network

By Mark Kimathi

The Google Content Network is complex; actually very complex. Brian Carter, director of Search Engine Marketing for Fuel Interactive a marketing agency in South Carolina, US tells of a conversation he had with their Google Adwords representative.

Evidently, the Google staff had come from an internal meeting with fellow adwords specialists discussing what works and what doesn’t in their content network.

The conversation led to Brain asking, "So you’re saying Adwords system is so complicated, you have to figure it out too?" His answer was, "Yes."

This means you and I can be forgiven somewhat for tripping all over adwords and especially the content network.

But lately, Google has been actively pushing for content network. It seems time has distilled some best practices that seem to work.

As with most Pay Per Click (PPC) models, the gist of success with Google Content Network (GCN) has to do with the way keywords chosen trigger ads.

So far it seems there are two main strategies of keyword themes, which are equally effective depending on your market. The first is remotely similar to the keyword theme strategies used in search PPC.

In search, the actual keyword is used to trigger an ad when that keyword constitutes a search query unlike in the GCN.

Related keywords

As a result, there is need for an adgroup to have very closely related keywords. For example, in a search PPC ad, you would have the keywords "abs exercises", "abs exercises" but not "abs workout" in the same adgroup.

If you wanted to target queries on "ab workouts" you probably would need to have a separate adgroup specifically triggering and ad with the headline "abs workout".

In GCN the abgroups are just as strict, but not as tight. The key here is to use one base keyword.

For example, in this case, the base keyword would be "abs". So "abs exercises" and "abs workout" would all be in the same adgroup to trigger the same ad because they have the same base keyword. This strategy covers a specific niche theme entirely.

The second keyword theme strategy is nearly counter-intuitive to an expert PPC. This is because it is literally a pot-pourri of semantically related keywords.

According to Mike Geary, founder of TruthAboutAbs.com, GCN consist of most of his profitable ads and he uses this second strategy a lot, because this strategy gets him more clicks and cheaper clicks.

In this strategy you use two to three base-keyword, for example "belly fat", "fat loss diets" and "abs".

You then find variations of these three base keywords and dump all of them in one adgroup. As a result, your strategy would cover a very wide though related theme. This in turn gives you a wide exposure.