Although the concept of entities for SEO has been around since 2012, it has not been widely adopted in PPC. Entities are essentially unique people, places, things, or concepts that provide context and relationships for keywords.
As AI becomes more prevalent in digital marketing, incorporating an entity-based approach into your PPC campaigns is one way to stay ahead of the competition. This article discusses how leveraging entities can significantly contribute to the success of PPC.
1. Entities for PPC Keyword Expansion
If you’re struggling to expand your keyword list, taking an entity-based approach could broaden your horizons.
Entities are important because of their relationships with other entities. Thinking about these relationships can help you discover ideas and insights that resonate with different groups of people based on their intent. In short, consider the context and assumptions behind your searches and use that to brainstorm new keywords.
Here are some questions to consider when brainstorming entity-based keywords:
Activities: What are people doing in relation to my product/service?
Identification of the entity: What specific activities or interests are associated with my business and product/service?
Relevance of the entity: How does my product/service relate to these activities as entities?
Pain points of the entity: What challenges do people who carry out these activities usually encounter?
Solutions of the entity: How does my product/service address and solve these problems?
Location: Where are the people who might need my product/service?
Scope of the entity: Which geographic locations are relevant to my company as entities?
Presence of the entity: Where are most of my customers located and how does this relate to location-based entities?
Associations of entities: What local landmarks, neighborhoods or events can I partner with my company to improve the relevance of the local entity?
Impact of the entity: How do geographic entities influence consumer behavior and preferences in my target locations?
Season or Event: When would people need my product/service?
Timing of the entity: What seasonal trends or events are relevant to my business?
Impact of the entity: How do seasonal or event-based entities influence my potential consumer behavior and preferences?
Integration of entities: How can I integrate seasonal or event-based entities into my copy and images to improve relevance?
Promotions of the entity: What promotions or special offers can I create to leverage seasonal or event-based entities and drive engagement?
By incorporating these entity-based principles into your PPC keyword expansion strategy, you’re creating a more comprehensive advertising approach that ties closely to your site’s relevance and authority.
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2. Entities to improve PPC quality scores
In PPC, it’s relatively easy to determine whether your website accurately portrays the entities and relationships you want; simply check your quality scores.
If your website follows an entity approach and the accompanying PPC campaigns are aligned with that approach, you’ll see high quality scores, which means lower costs per click and higher click-through rates.
The quality level is calculated by Google based on three factors that are strongly influenced by the recognition of the entity:
Expected Click Through Rate (CTR): Entities influence the click-through rate of your ads by ensuring that your campaigns align with your audience’s interests, intent, and preferences. When your ads resonate with users based on their search queries and interests, they’re more likely to click through to your website, resulting in a higher expected CTR.
Ad Relevance: Entities ensure that your ads are relevant to user intent, not just matching keywords. By optimizing your ad copy for relevant entities, you increase your chances of serving ads that match what users want to find, which increases your ad’s relevance.
Landing Page Experience: The entities on your landing pages directly affect the landing page experience. When your landing pages provide relevant content that aligns with the entities featured in your ads, users are more likely to meet their expectations and have a positive experience with your website.
Essentially, the more cohesive the journey from search term to published ad to landing page, the more positive the user experience is likely to be.
Quality Score is the search engine’s attempt to assess whether you are offering content that users want to see. Giving them something that perfectly matches their intent with the bottom line is a quality search experience. And it’s much easier to account for intent with entities than with keywords alone.
3. Entities for the strategic targeting of PPC audiences
Traditional audience segmentation allows you to identify key demographics to target, such as age, device, and location. But when you combine these insights with the contextual relevance of entity-based targeting, you dig deeper into who your audience is and who your audience could be.
For example, you might be working on PPC campaigns for a local restaurant. Of course, they may only want to target the local geographic area, but don’t stop there.
If you were using entity-based PPC strategies, you would have a campaign targeting the local geographic area and targeting user interests, behaviors, and relationships with entities across the geographic region. It can be a campaign aimed at all audiences interested in a local food festival or a campaign aimed at users looking for a tourist activity nearby.
AI-based targeting options, such as behavioral and audience-based targeting, have been used in advertising platforms for a long time. Segments of custom combinations they can make them even more effective.
Admittedly, they are a respectable attempt by search engines to find relevant consumer segments that are connected but may not be directly related to your product or service. If you’re not taking advantage of these audience options, you’re missing out on potential.
The real beauty of entity-based targeting is in the numbers and the information it provides, even if it “fails”. Remember, you always learn something from a well-designed experiment.
By analyzing data from different audience segments, you can refine your targeting strategy to identify high-performing segments that deliver the best ROI. You may also discover new consumer groups and behavioral insights that can guide your broader marketing strategy.
In our restaurant example above, they may find that adding a new dish to their menu that directly references nearby tourist attractions increases the number of out-of-town visitors. I can guarantee they won’t find out by limiting their reach to just a local campaign from Google Keyword Planner.
Optimize your campaigns with an entity-based approach
I like to think of entities as AI’s attempt to codify the human penchant for assumptions, nuances, and subtleties in our communication.
If you want to get ahead of your competition, adapting your PPC efforts to account for entities is a great approach because few companies are investing time in it right now.
Whether you’re a global brand or a local restaurant, incorporating entity-based strategies into your PPC playbook will help improve your marketing efforts and drive performance.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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