You don’t have to pay a premium

As the holidays roll around, it seems there is a never-ending supply of searchers out there looking for JUST the product you’re offering … if only you could get to them. Right? Not necessarily, as a couple posts this week point out. First of all, you don’t have to get keyword happy and pay a lot for the words that have a high premium placed on them right now. As the Rimm Kaufman blog puts it:

This is the time of year when aspirations can cloud good judgment. “But there are SO MANY people searching for ‘Christmas gifts’ and we do sell Christmas gifts so shouldn’t we at least be on the first page?!?” Experience has taught us to try to talk our clients off that intellectual ledge.

But why? The post goes on to explain that buying into broad (and expensive) search terms like “holiday gifts” or “gifts for him” won’t get you the kind of customers you’re looking for. Someone typing in search terms that are so broad doesn’t really know what they’re looking for – and the chance they’re looking for what you have to offer is pretty slim. Which brings us to our next post, Avoiding the Masses, on SocialSearchMarketer.com. This post has a similar contention in that if you’re selling a certain niche product or service, you don’t want to pay for ALL the traffic related to the parent product or service. The post uses the example of jeans to explain negative targeting:

If I am selling pants, but I don’t carry Nike sweats or Diesel jeans, I am going to want to negatively target these brands in my pants campaigns.  Simple, straightforward, and hopefully, every paid search marketer is doing it.

Employing this type of targeting is a win-win, as you’re not paying a premium for over-used keywords, and you end up with better search traffic anyway!