Hello all,

I am new to the forum and to adwords. I have recently been appointed by my company to help with marketing. One question my current supervisor has brought up is the number of keywords to be used. Google states that you should use no more than 20, but we wonder if this may just be a ploy to get us to use less space. Does having more keywords really lessen the effectiveness? Or, should you use as many and whatever keywords are relevant?

I use as many keywords as are relevant. However, I try to keep the number to something reasonable. Usually that means to create groups based on themes in your keyword list.

Having done this for four years, I don't think it's a good idea to put someone in charge of a PPC account if they don't have PPC experience. I understand your company wanting someone from the inside to do it but it will not be profitable. Best to hire someone, at the very least to set it all up properly.

Are you asking how many keywords you should bid on or how many keywords you should try to optimize the page for?

You should bid on as many words and phrases that give a positive return. There's no limit as long as you can find profitable keywords and phrases to bid on.

I wouldn't say there's a hard and fast rule for how many keywords you can optimize a page for. However realistically you can only optimize for so many things. Everything starts competing with each other after awhile. Think more in terms of keyword themes for a page. Maybe your main phrase on a page is 'web design' You could easily include phrases like:

web design services
web design services calfornia
web design services los angeles
affordable web design services
etc

However your page won't really be optimized for all. You'd probably do better to focus one page on affordable web design services and another on web design services los angeles.

More important is to make sure the page reads well to real people. You can drive all the traffic you want to a page, but if it reads like a list of keywords no one will stick around.

Hope that makes sense and hope I answered your question somewhere in there.

First of all you have to sort out a list of keywords relevant to your site....build the list around the core keyword....for example..if you are dealing with "bags"....your core keyword would b 'bag' and the keywords related would be sports bag,reebok bag, trolley bag dependin on what you sell. After you get a list of keywords what you have to do is to trash some of the non-relevant keywords from your sites point of view...theres no limit on the number of keywords that are to be selected....it all depends on your niche....some categories have hundreds and some end up very few.....I hope this helps...Cheers

To give my two cents, I have found much success with 5-20 long tail keywords and have 3 ads circulating.