Ahead of competitors: where to find the most converting keywords for Google Ads

When working with advertising on Google Ads, properly selected keywords will attract a relevant audience to your landing page or website, increasing the likelihood of them taking the target action. Conversely, improperly chosen keywords and phrases can lead to wasteful spending of your budget and displaying ads to people for whom the promoted offer isn’t relevant. In this article, together with the team from YeezyPay, a service providing trusted agency Google Ads accounts, we explore how to select the most relevant keywords that will make your advertising campaign profitable.

Preparation stage for keyword selection

Before diving into methods and tools for finding high-converting keywords, webmasters or advertisers need to go through several preparatory stages:

• Conducting analysis of the target audience, their interests, and their long-term relevance. The more detailed the socio-demographic, behavioral, and psychophysical factors are defined, the higher the likelihood of identifying audience queries for the offer;
• Defining the goals of the advertising campaign (e.g., sales, brand awareness, informing about promotions and discounts, etc.). Keywords largely depend on the campaign goals. Depending on the goal, keywords can be commercial, branded, or informational.

Effective tools for finding relevant keywords for Google Ads campaigns

As of 2024, experienced PPC specialists and media buyers employ several approaches simultaneously to gather highly relevant semantics for advertising campaigns on Google Ads. While you can use a single tool, combining them is often more effective. Below are the methods most commonly used.

Studying competitors' ads in Google search results

This method is free but time-consuming and labor-intensive for webmasters, as it involves manually examining competitors' ads by entering and selecting various relevant keyword options.

Additionally, some webmasters review other ads from each competitor by visiting the Google Advertising Transparency Center, accessible by clicking the three-dot icon next to the ad in the search results.

Google Ads keyword planner

Another basic yet effective tool is the Keyword Planner within the Google Ads dashboard. With it, you can select new keywords manually or parse the main keywords of competitors by simply inserting a link to their landing page or website. This method helps find new ideas to expand the semantic core of the advertising campaign and, based on it, create headlines and descriptions with a unique selling proposition that will effectively differentiate the offer from competitors.

Google Search Console

If the landing page or website has been attracting organic search traffic and/or traffic from ads for some time and has the Google Search Console script installed, the "Search Results" and "Google Search Console Insights" tabs can be used to find the most popular user queries that most frequently lead them to the landing page or website.

Using specialized software

Various specialized software significantly simplifies the work of creating and optimizing the semantic core for Google Ads campaigns. For instance, experienced webmasters use Serpstat, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, key.so, spywords, and others. Some of these services allow identifying the most converting keywords in both organic search results and competitors' PPC campaigns based on specified parameters.

Unlike standard Google tools, such software allows searching for keywords even in gray verticals. However, ad campaigns with such keywords are often rejected, take longer to undergo moderation, and accounts may get blocked. To speed up moderation and extend the account lifespan, while retaining the ability to withdraw the remaining ad budget in case of account blockage, you can use Google Ads agency accounts, which have increased trust from Google. Access to such agency accounts can be obtained through the YeezyPay service.

Google Search suggestions and frequently asked questions

Finding the most relevant keywords and phrases for the offer, as well as getting inspiration for creating unique approaches to headlines and descriptions in ads, can be helped by search suggestions and the frequently asked questions section.

The output of key phrases in these tools is based on the most popular queries depending on the topic, so the likelihood of identifying high-converting keywords here is quite high.

Google Trends

You can also select relevant keywords and queries based on similar searches in a specific GEO or in the overall Google Trends output. Simply choose the GEO and enter the offer or niche name in the search bar.

Here are a few additional hacks for selecting high-converting keywords for Google advertising.

During the process of selecting relevant keywords and phrases for promoting on Google Ads, it's crucial not to forget about creating and continually optimizing a list of negative keywords. These help prevent budget waste on non-targeted audiences. Besides negative keywords, consider adding their synonyms and variations to the list since they may also attract users whose queries differ from your promoted offer.

Experienced media buyers and PPC specialists also recommend regularly conducting split tests of two ads with different inputs. Additionally, to increase ad campaign efficiency and reduce costs, it's essential to implement long-tail and low-frequency queries that are less competitive.

And one more trick is to constantly analyze feedback and comments from customers, buyers, and subscribers. These often contain the most popular words and phrases that can potentially attract even more new leads.

Conclusion

There are many ways to find the most relevant and profitable keywords and phrases for advertising on Google Ads. The list provided in this article isn’t exhaustive, but it includes the most popular and straightforward methods for creating and optimizing the semantic core of an advertising campaign.

It’s important to remember that even if Google itself suggests these search phrases, it doesn’t guarantee that Google Ads will approve the advertisements into which webmasters add them. Therefore, to simplify working with advertising in this source, experienced media buyers recommend using trusted advertising agency accounts, which can be obtained through the YeezyPay service.