Keyword Research Best Practices For New PPC Account Setups

One of the most important steps in any new pay-per-click account setup happens right after you’ve decided which products and services you’re targeting. Once each product or service is segmented into its own ad group — pointed at the matching landing page on your site — you need to build a keyword batch for each ad group. A good keyword batch does two jobs at once: it delivers the maximum amount of relevant, targeted traffic to that landing page (at your budget level), while blocking the maximum amount of unwanted traffic from ever seeing or clicking your ads.

That whole batch comes from a single round of keyword research — but research is only the beginning. Once your account is live, the batch gets continually refined based on performance data and on search term reports, which show the exact terms people typed into Google before your ad showed. That ongoing keyword and bid management is a topic for another post (or another hundred posts), so here we’ll stay focused on keyword research as it applies to a new account setup.

Here’s how to build out a keyword batch the right way.

Step One: The tools you’ll need

If you haven’t already, install the free desktop editors: Google Ads Editor for Google Ads accounts and Microsoft Advertising Editor for Microsoft Advertising (Bing) accounts. These let you build and bulk-edit campaigns far faster than the web interface. You’ll also want a spreadsheet — Excel or Google Sheets — for building and managing your keyword batches efficiently.

Your primary keyword research tool is Google’s own Keyword Planner, free inside every Google Ads account (Tools → Planning → Keyword Planner). Beyond that, third-party tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can surface additional keyword ideas and competitor data, but they’re optional — a beginner or do-it-yourselfer can build excellent batches with Keyword Planner and the search term report alone. This post is geared toward doing exactly that.

Step Two: Segment the account properly

Adding the right keywords accomplishes little if they send visitors to off-topic landing pages, or if you’ve mixed different types of user behavior into the same campaign. Structure comes first, at two levels.

Campaign level — separate Search from Display. These are two fundamentally different kinds of traffic:

Search campaigns reach users who are actively looking for something by typing it into Google. This is where the bulk of your keyword work lives, and where match types matter (more on that below).

Display campaigns show your ads to people as they browse websites, apps, and Gmail — they’re not actively searching. Keywords here should be a smaller, more general set, since Display serves ads based on overall relevance rather than matching a specific search term.

Ad group level — one product or service per ad group. Once your campaigns exist, segment your keywords by ad group, with each ad group targeting a single product or service. A personal injury firm, for example, would have separate ad groups for personal injury / attorneys / lawyers generally, and then distinct ad groups for dog bites, slip and fall, motorcycle accidents, car accidents, and so on. This tight structure keeps your keywords, ads, and landing pages aligned — and the ad groups can be copied between campaigns (within Google Ads Editor) or exported to a spreadsheet and imported into another platform like Microsoft Advertising.

Step Three: Do the keyword research

Building your batch efficiently combines the research tools with your own experience and any stock templates you’ve developed. The most important tool, and there’s little disagreement among PPC professionals here, is Keyword Planner. Open it, then enter several on-topic, relevant search terms that best describe the product or service that ad group targets.

You can also paste the URL of your landing page — or a competitor’s landing page — and let Keyword Planner suggest keyword ideas based on that page’s content. Just as important as any tool is your own intuition: variations and negative terms that show up as you work should be added manually based on what you know will (and won’t) work for your market.

Step Four: Build your search term and negative keyword lists

Search terms. Using the personal injury example, to build the slip-and-fall ad group you’d enter terms like slip and fall attorney, slip fall lawyers, and slip and fall accidents. Don’t worry about singular vs. plural for Display; do pay attention to it for Search. Run the report, export it to a spreadsheet, and parse through it, copying every relevant term into that ad group’s keyword list.

Negative keywords. Concurrently, build a negative keyword list from that same research. Negatives for the slip-and-fall example would include off-topic terms that cost money without producing clients — words like job, jobs, videos, youtube, news, stories, articles, research, data, and so on. Use plurals in negative lists in most cases. Over time you’ll develop stock negative templates — by industry, by geography (a Denver-only business should negative-out other cities, counties, zip codes and states), and by general groupings like questions and job seekers — that you can bulk-add to every relevant account.

There are two levels to apply negatives:

1. Campaign-level negatives block unwanted traffic across every ad group in that campaign. For the personal injury firm, that might mean blocking bankruptcy, divorce, free, advice, insurance, real estate, schools, jobs, degrees, and salaries — filtering out services the firm doesn’t offer and people looking to enter law as a career.

2. Ad-group-level negatives block traffic only within a specific ad group. For instance, blocking car accident, truck accident, slip and fall, and workers compensation inside the motorcycle-accident ad group, so each ad group only serves for its own intent.

Step Five: Keyword match types

Here’s what’s changed most since this topic was first written. Google Ads now has three match types, not four — Broad, Phrase, and Exact. The old Broad Match Modifier was retired in 2021, and Phrase match was expanded to absorb much of what it used to do, so any advice built around “BMM” is out of date.

What the three do, briefly:

Exact match: Shows your ad for that term and very close variants. The most control, the tightest targeting.
Phrase match: Shows for searches that include the meaning of your phrase. A middle ground, and much broader than it used to be.
Broad match: Shows for the widest range of related searches. Powerful but hungry — it needs strong negative keywords and works best paired with Smart Bidding and clear conversion tracking, so Google’s automation has good signals to optimize toward.

For a new setup, a common approach is to start with Phrase and Exact for control while you gather data, and introduce Broad selectively once conversion tracking and Smart Bidding are in place. Different match types are effectively separate versions of the same term — their bids, cost, and performance are managed independently once data starts coming in. Frequently a broader variation performs poorly while the exact version shows strong ROI, or vice versa, which is exactly why you want the structure in place from day one: the more clean data you gather at setup, the better your ongoing bid management will be.

Bringing it together

Keyword research is the foundation, but it’s one element of a bigger picture — ad copy and landing pages are the other two pillars, and a PPC account is a long-term process of testing, assessment, and optimization at both the micro and macro level. Get the setup right, keep managing it against the data, and the account’s performance compounds over the life of the business.

That setup-and-management discipline is exactly what separates an account that quietly wastes budget from one that drives profitable leads — and it’s the heart of professional PPC management. If you’d rather have a senior specialist build and run your account this way from day one, that’s what our Google Ads Management service is for.