Hi, Not sure if you newbies or experts know this, but if you are not sure what keywords / phrases to choose for your campaigns in Adwords, then look no further. I am going to tell you one way that it may work. I have not tested it myself, but just thought of it just now and by the looks of things I would think it would work 99%. This is infact most probably old news, but here goes. If you have a stats program or Analytics set up then you can look at your stats for the previous month or further back than that even. Now go to the search engines section of your stats and see what keywords / phrases where typed into the search engine Google when each visitor came to your website. If you have a few visitors for a certain keyword and it also has quite a few pageviews per visitor then you know that using this keyword / phrase is most likely going to be good as these visitors are more likely to be interested in what your site offers which is shown by the number of pages they look at on your site on average. Now, there is no point in bidding on these keywords or phrases if you already are ranked #1, #2, #3, etc in Google, but if you are not on the 1st or 2nd page of Google results then it may be worth you bidding on this keyword / phrase, which will then result in a quicker amount and most probably more traffic as by bidding it will then get you on the first page of Google results if you bid enough. Now this is not the solution to your keywords / phrases problems that you may have and there are much more things to consider when having a ROI with Adwords, but it's something that will probably help you when choosing some of your keywords / phrases. Hope this has helped a little.
I bid on keywords even though I am already #1. I think it gives me even more chances of getting clicked.
I also don't see the point in it. I would personally think that most of Googles uses would look at the first few listings before looking at the ads on the right. If you get your ad above the listings though then that could be a totally different story.
I can see a case for not bidding if you're at position 1 or 2 ( though if you have business competitors serving up ads for those keywords, for what you are offering, I would say it's worth doing), but the OPs implication to not bid for keywords that you are lower down on the first page, or even the second page - hmmm....how many seachers bother to look beyond the first 4 or 5 links? and if they've found something that suits in the first one or two, they are never going to look at the second page.
Most gurus maintain that organic listings and AdWords have no bearing on each other and I'm inclined to accept this judgement. However, I'm fortunate enough to appear for many of my keywords on the first or second organic pages AND I use AdWords as well, which also turn up on the first page and (seemingly all) subsequent ones. I don't think this sort of "duplication" has any effect on my web position, but I'm very ready to believe that visitors take (some) notice of it. Perhaps the one "confirms" the other, but I do know that I get a healthy number of clicks and, on the whole, they're equally divided among the two generating sources. Sure, I could save money by cancelling my AdWords campaigns, but I'm quite sure this would prove to be -- as we English folk still say -- penny wise but pound foolish. Duncan
It wouldn't or shouldn't affect the serps. All I was thinking of is that if you are positioned at #1 or #2 plus had adwords for that same keyword, what about if the visitor decides to click on the adword listing when the visitor would have clicked on the listing instead if you didn't have the adword listing. Now that has just cost you when it wouldn't if you didn't have it. Saying this though, I have just realised that I have many listings positioned at #1, #2, #3, #4, etc. and still have adwords listings on the 1st page. I'm using keywords like "play games" without the quotes so it also brings up the adwords listing if someone types in "online play games". I'm not going to look for every combination and I prefer to use the keywords/phrases without the quotes or exact match as the traffic is still converting for me and it brings in more traffic.
All I was thinking of is that if you are positioned at #1 or #2 plus had adwords for that same keyword, what about if the visitor decides to click on the adword listing when the visitor would have clicked on the listing instead if you didn't have the adword listing. Now that has just cost you when it wouldn't if you didn't have it. Yes, but if someone else has an ad there, and you don't, they would have clicked to go to someone else's site, not yours.