Keywords: Are you basing yours on best guesses or actual data?

Keywords can make or break your online marketing efforts, and that’s especially true for search engine marketing. When you’re hitching your marketing spend to specific keyword sets, it’s important to follow some best practices.

Check out these tips for choosing the right keywords for home improvement search engine marketing:

1. Analyze Your Organic Search Traffic
Start with what you already know (even if you don’t know you know it). Choose pages on your site that are performing well with organic search traffic. This means they get a lot of clicks from SERPs.

Pass those pages through a content analyzer tool such as BuzzSumo, SEMrush, or Ahrefs’ keyword explorer. These tools can tell you what keywords people are using to find your site organically.

Since you know homeowners are already searching for those keywords, they might be a good addition to your ad campaigns.

2. Add Long-Tail Keywords
Chasing only keywords with the highest search volumes can get expensive fast. And while it might get you seen a lot, it’s not an effective way to maximize your conversions.

Consider peppering your home improvement SEM campaigns with highly targeted long-tail keywords. These keywords often generate fewer searches a month, but people who use them may be much more motivated and likely to convert.

Also, so-called less popular long-tail keywords actually make up the bulk of all keywords. According to Ahrefs, key phrases with 10 or fewer searches each month make up more than 90 percent of its database of 1.9 billion keywords.

3. Don’t Forget Buying Keywords
Whether you’re researching high-volume or long-tail keywords, make sure you’re including phrases with buying intent. Examples include phrases such as “where to buy windowpanes,” “who can install new windows near me,” and “how much does a bay window cost?”

These types of keywords are powerful when paired with the right SEM efforts. In fact, 65 percent of the clicks on buying keywords go to ads rather than organic search result links.

Keywords can have a mighty impact on your home improvement SEM results. Take some time before each campaign to gather data and make smart keyword decisions.