In the spirit of optimization, we often sit in on online seminars about new technologies or topics important to our industry. Gotta keep this machine well-oiled! I recently sat in on a search marketing web seminar that was all about keyword research. Now, as these things tend to be, it was largely a sales pitch. Hrmpf. But, it did provide a nice reiteration of some best practices (so quick nod to the host of the webinar, paid search reporting platform, ClickEquations).
This inspired me to spread the continuing education love and share some small steps you must be taking in your keyword research and selection to make your paid search advertising campaigns successful.
Before you set up a campaign, you always start with your planning phase—the volume research, the competitive analysis, etc. This is an important phase. More important, though, is what comes after you launch your campaign: the keyword optimization. It’s important that you keep an eye on your keywords, measure performance, and use your findings to perfect your paid efforts.
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Once the year starts winding down and the months begin to get closer to the holiday season, there’s one thing lurking in the back of everyone’s mind (whether they like it or not), and that one thing is, you guessed it, shopping for the holidays. The feeling of the season-of-giving creeping up might give you a warm tingly feeling inside, or on the other hand completely stress you out. But in the end, the bitter realization is, that when this time comes around people will be spending money, and lots of it (no matter the state of the economy). The big difference these days is (with the economy in its current state), consumers are going to use every resource possible to find the best deal out there.
Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.
There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -
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