I am often asked about how we get more leads for less money when we overhaul and manage client paid search programs. Experience helps, but being negative is important, too.
For all of you cynics and pessimists, this is not a rare opportunity to validate your glumness. Sorry. Getting negative in search engine marketing world means refining keyword lists to weed out unwanted searchers who aren’t really looking for you in the first place. You are simply subtracting words and phrases that don’t belong.
Adding negative keywords is similar to the process of adding keywords. The only difference is there is a minus symbol before the keyword. For example, say you are in higher education and looking for prospective students for a new graduate studies program in Art Therapy. An ad group may have these keywords:
art therapy program
art therapy graduate program
- pictures
- employment
- supplies
The negative keywords help keep the ad group targeted. So, in this example you are working to limit your ad impressions and your important click dollars to those leads focused on obtaining an education—not those looking for pictures, jobs, supplies, etc.
There are web analytics tools to show actual search queries and help flush out negative keywords. Good common sense goes a long way, too. The key is to look back after getting negative to see if click through rates and overall performance have improved.
Tags: campaign optimization, negative keywords, paid search, sem
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Microsoft has been a distant third in the search engine race for quite some time, so when Bing hit the scene, I have watched with a careful eye. When clients ask me the question, “How important is it that we optimize for Bing?”, I respond, “Let’s look at the search engine usage numbers.”
Google has dominated the space for quite a stretch. The search engine giant, on average, owns 60% or more of the share of U.S. searches. Microsoft is typically in the single digits. It’s a steep climb.
According to an article in today’s New York Times:
Still, Bing remains a distant third in the search race. It would have to triple its audience to catch Yahoo — and grow eightfold to tie Google, which accounts for 65 percent of searches in the United States.
The same article is praising Bing for its ambitious effort to start the climb. Responses have been positive in general, and I feel Microsoft’s team has generated some buzz on a product that people use and like.
So, let’s get back to the numbers game and the question about optimizing for Bing. Microsoft has moved up a couple of points.This move is good. Is it news that has me rethinking my search engine marketing strategies and optimization efforts? No.
I recommend–on this day and with Bing in its infancy–to look at pay-per-click on Bing. Costs are attractive and there are more eyeballs, generating buzz and clicks. For organic search, I still keep my eye on Google and that fat share it has of all U.S. searches.
Tags: bing, google, optimizing, paid search, search engine share
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