Brand building

You want your company name to be seen and recognized in your industry without becoming generic — that’s branding. When you think Nike, you think of a lifestyle, not merely a pair of running shoes. When your company is branded, it becomes a search keyword all by itself. Successful branding associates you with your particular industry so tightly that you're nearly synonymous. The key word here is nearly, of course. You don't want to have your brand name become so watered down that you lose control of how people use it. For instance, when you sneeze, do you reach for a tissue or a Kleenex? When you need a paper copied, do you photocopy it or Xerox it? A recent brand struggling with this problem is Google. It's been fighting to remind people that you're not “Googling your blind date,” you're “performing a search on your blind date by using Google.” Walking that line is probably a long way down the road for most businesses, however.

You can build awareness of your brand instantly by purchasing pay per click ads. Every time your company name shows up visibly in search results for a particular search query, it helps to build your brand. If your business is selling classic custom cars, you can make your name appear on search results for [classic custom cars] simply by bidding for that keyword phrase with the search engines. Although you might need to do months of search engine optimization work to bring your listing up to the first page in the natural search results, pay per click ads give you a way to increase your branding right away.

We usually recommend that clients buy ads for their own company names. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t show up in natural search results for their own names. This is brand nonexistence, at least on the web. If you want to generate brand awareness, taking out PPC ads on your branded terms is a quick fix that should be on your to-do list. And if your company already does rank well in the natural search results for your branded terms, including a PPC ad as well only strengthens your branding. According to studies done by Microsoft, companies with the top organic spot and the top paid listing receive a greater brand lift than those appearing in either location alone.

When you're building your brand name, make sure your brand goes first in the Title tags on your website. For example, a page on our company site could have a Title tag that looks like this:

<title>Bruce Clay, Inc. - Search Engine Optimization Services</title>.

When you put your brand name first, it shows up first in your search results listing (as well as at the top of the browser window when someone is on your site). This exposure helps to give your brand a sense of authority. Be aware, however, that this does sacrifice some relevancy in the mind of the user when searching on non-branded terms.

Identifying keywords with low click-through rates

Pay per click ads let you easily test different keywords. Write your ads by using good marketing copy that’s highly relevant to the keyword phrase you’re bidding on in a search engine’s paid search. After you’ve accomplished that, you can find out which keywords yield the most click-throughs (when people click the link) and conversions (when people not only visit your site, but also buy what you offer). Conversely, you can weed out those keywords that have low click-through and conversion rates.

After all, just being listed on a search results page is of little value if people don’t click through to your site. With pay per click ads, you can find out which search terms work best at generating the kind of traffic you need. Broad search terms such as [cars] are probably not a good place to put your ad money. First of all, these types of broad terms are heavily searched, which makes the bidding for them more competitive. The per-click cost for a broad term would be very high (measured by price per click times traffic) and might not be worth it. Also, although [cars] is searched frequently, the click-through rate is very low. Even if someone does click your listing and visit your site, broad search queries tend to have low conversion rates because the people usually are just seeking general information and not ready to take action, such as making a purchase.

As a best practice, bid on everything that has a positive ROI and test, test, test — always test … never stop.

You want keywords that specifically draw people to your site and result in conversions. Here are a few facts you can keep in mind:

• Approximately 70 percent of search queries contain at least three words.
• People tend to use short, one- or two-word search queries for information gathering; those searches usually don’t convert into customers.
• When users refine their search by using longer queries, they tend to be more seriously looking for a product or service.
• In general, users are getting more sophisticated and using more refined searches (meaning they type in longer search queries).

When choosing good keywords for your site, keep in mind the long-tail effect we cover in Book I, Chapter 5. The long tail is a statistical concept that says items in comparatively low demand can nonetheless add up to quite large volumes. The idea is that longer, more specific keyword phrases may not get a lot of traffic, but when people do search for them, the likelihood of click-through and conversion is quite high. Take our classic custom cars website example. A long-tail keyword phrase such as [1965 Ford Mustang GT] might make an excellent keyword phrase for a pay per click ad linked right to the Ford Mustang page on the website. Although the phrase might not get searched very often, someone typing in this search query would probably be a serious shopper — or, at the very least, will find exactly what she’s looking for on your web page.

You want to purchase long-tail keyword phrases for pay per click ads for several reasons:

• They’re relatively cheap to buy because fewer sites bid on them.
• The bounce rate (percentage of people who click a listing but then bounce right back to the search results by clicking the Back button) tends to be low because your web page closely relates to the search query.
• Fewer searches mean fewer clicks, so your costs remain low.
• The pay per click ads let you test different keyword phrases and find out what people search for that leads them to your site.
• You can apply what you figure out with your pay per click ads directly to optimize your website for effective keywords, which can help you rank highly in organic search results. Your ranking may go up fairly easily for these long-tail keywords because they’re less competitive.
• Long-tail traffic adds up, and that makes it attractive.

If you have ads that people aren’t clicking, the keyword might not be the problem. A low click-through rate could be due to a number of factors:

• Your ad copy may not be written well.
• Your ad may not be relevant to the search term.
• The audience your ad is targeting is not the same audience searching for the keywords that you associate with the ad.

Because there are several variables, it may be difficult to pinpoint exactly why a given ad has a low click-through rate. You can actually learn more from ads with high click-through rates than you can from those that under-perform. If you’ve found a winning combination of ad copy and relevant keyword terms and it’s bringing the right kind of traffic to your website, you have marketing gold. By all means, apply the same types of keywords to your website to improve your organic search engine optimization, as well.