Identify High Traffic Keywords

High Traffic keywords deserve special treatment!  If you have  a keyword which represents more than 5% to 10% of your impressions, clicks, or ad spending, and are not giving it special treatment, then you’re dropping the ball.

Keyword Selection

The success of a new Adwords account depends significantly on decisions about keyword selection. Choosing the right keywords and negative keywords, understanding the traffic potential of the keywords you select, and making the right choices, during the selection process, about ad groups and campaigns are all critical factors for the successful launch of any pay per click advertising campaign.

Especially for new SEM Analysts, I’m often asked about how to develop keyword lists. This post is for you.

Pay Per Click for Marketing Research

Yesterday we met with an advertising company in Denver and discussed the role of pay per click in the context of an Advertiser’s broader marketing plans. The meeting began with a great presentation by Heather Lutze (if you haven’t seen her show, then you’re missing out). Following the presentation, several of us fielded questions. One related to the proper steps of commencing a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) effort and whether it pays to delay the process with pay per click (PPC). My reply was that pay per click, if managed properly, by definition results in a measurable positive return on ad spending. Of course that’s great for any Advertiser, but many marketing managers overlook the other potential benefits of using pay per click advertising to methodically test keyword lists, website content, and website design, in advance of any on-page SEO design, or SEO link building efforts.

In this sense, advertising agencies and marketing managers should think of pay per click advertising as a form of self-funding marketing research.

Yahoo’s Jambalaya SER

One of the things I love about Yahoo is that they aren’t afraid to trash the reputation of their search engine by turning their organic search results into spicy jambalaya. Yahoo Paid Inclusion (also called Yahoo Search Submit, and Yahoo Search Submit Pro) allow almost anyone to purchase listings in Yahoo organic search results.

Hot Debates About Hot Keywords

Yesterday I was involved in another debate about whether Amazon should be buying hot keywords, like its own name, and the word, “books.”

Today a client told me that PPC is becoming the betamax of SEO.

7 Reasons to Outsource to Denver PPC

If you’re an SEO company which dabbles in Pay Per Click, then this post is for you.

Introducing Keyword Adequacy Quotient

Adwords’ Search Query Performance Report could be significantly improved. However, if you’re using Broad or Phrase Match Keywords, run the report in order to identify ways to improve performance, and calculate your Keyword Adequacy Quotient. Track your Keyword Adequacy Quotient over time, and you’ll find that your account performance will improve as your Score improves.

Hats Off to Adwords Developers

We’ve made several suggestions in the past for improving Adwords’ online interface and desktop editor, and Google has actually made several of the revisions. The most recent one was adding “dismiss” to alerts. I imagine that once a dozen or so similar suggestions pile up, a manager in Adwords’ development department schedules the revision for programming.  So I’m adding this post as a sort of Adwords wish list, and beginning it with two suggestions I made yesterday via an online chat with a Google chat representative.  Please feel free to add to the list whenever you have ideas for improving either the online Adwords interface or the Adwords desktop editor.

Building a Scalable SEM Organization

We find the business of Search Engine Marketing interesting from an economic standpoint, only to the extent it can be scaled. The demand for our services is strong, but doing a proper job of managing Adwords (and particularly Yahoo and MSN) accounts is incredibly labor intensive.

Return on our clients’ Ad Spending depends on a lot of technical, detailed, day to day decisions made within a framework for monitoring and continuously improving the performance of ad accounts. So the key to building a successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM) mammoth is to design the organization, at all levels, to provide exceptional client service.