Niche holidays and niche PPC keywords…..

A good discussion going on over at the Travolution blog regarding niche keywords on Pay Per Click search engines (like Google / Overture / Miva (eSpotting) etc) (read the discussion). It appears that the primary, generic, keywords are becoming a little too expensive due to their competitive nature.

This all stems from a TravelZest report showing a boom in special interest holidays - and issues raised by this growth. The areas that are expected to grow are, as reported by TravelMole.com, are as follows:

• Learn-a-skill-in the-sun (e.g. cooking, surfing, painting, salsa dancing)
• Inner self escapes (e.g. yoga, meditation, spa)
• Hobbies abroad (e.g. art, gardens, cycling)
• Festivals & Fiestas (dance, opera, food & wine)
• Eco-lifestyle
• Wildlife & nature tours
• Sports tourism (following teams and playing sport)
• The home-from-home hotel
• Soft and extreme adventure
• Nip/ Tuck tourism 

Going back to the Pay Per Click keywords - Travolution reports that the answer to the expensive generic keyword problem is to ”focus on niche keywords”.

OK - so quick question - if you do Pay Per Click advertising on search engines (rather than PPC on verticals like Cheapflights / Travel Supermarket etc) - how many keywords are you actively bidding on? What would be a good number?

I remember when managing 1000 (one thousand) keywords seemed like quite a lot - but 4 years ago I co-ordinated the setup of a Pay Per Click campaign for a medium to big European travel “dot com” and we managed to get about 200,000 (two hundred thousand) keywords into each search engine (in multiple European languages). This was quite a nightmare to setup and manage but that is another story. I thought that we were doing well - but a little “birdie” told me that one of the other, larger, travel dot coms had about a million search terms loaded - while eBay had about 7 million!

I guess you can never be too niche with your PPC keywords!

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