MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Are you finding that the search terms you have selected for your campaign are not performing as well as expected or that your competitor’s performance is far superior to yours?

Then make sure you have at the very least considered all of the following possible variations of your key terms:-

* Plurals
* Hyphenated words
* Synonyms
* Acronyms
* Misspellings
* Variations of the associated verbs (Flats to Rent, Flats to Let)
* One word vs. two word spellings (AdText vs. Ad Text)

There is a great deal of debate around Search term ‘misspellings’. Some people feel that it is not best practice to optimise for them, whereas others suggest that you will be missing out if you don’t.

My suggestion would be to include these ‘misspellings’ in your PPC Campaign and avoid optimising for them in your SEO efforts. At least with PPC you can include the misspelling in your Ad Text and avoid diminishing the integrity of your website/conversion Page.

Don’t forget additional location-based spellings. Obviously this is not an issue if you are targeting only one specific location, but if you are targeting a broad area, this is imperative. A good example here would be the art of cooking meat on a fire. If you were in South Africa, a ‘braai’ would be a common term, whereas in the UK or US this is almost unheard of, and a BBQ would be a more suitable word to use.

The word BBQ brings us to another important point – acronyms. In many cases we would consider the acronym to be more popular than the complete phrase. PPC and SEO are good examples of this. How often do you hear people talking about Search Engine Optimisation as opposed to SEO? Generally people in the industry communicate with each other using the acronym, whereas if you were talking to a friend with no knowledge of the subject you would use the extended version.

When it comes to selecting your keywords, a lot of the choices you make are dependent on the specific consumer you are targeting. Try thinking the way they think. What search phrase would they type in to the search engine to find your product, service or content? For example, you are marketing an accounting package. Who would your target market be? Small business owners, CEOs of large corporations, accountants? You can’t just include search phrases that you think the CEOs or accountants will use, as for all you know they may have asked their secretaries or receptionists to research products for them.

Consider your target market in its entirety and don’t just optimise for one class or level of consumer/user.