Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro has penned an interesting column on searchengineland.com:
http://searchengineland.com/who-owns-the-search-page-15720.php
He talks about ‘ownership’ of the results page and differentiates nicely between brand communications and direct-response search advertising.
His paid-search philosophy is that staking out a presence on a broad range of relevant keywords is a good place to start with search advertising. The results page doesn’t and will never belong to a particular advertiser’s brand and a presence here on a particular keyword is a necessary first step before advertisers can bring searchers through to their turf (the landing page).
This is a useful way to think when deciding where you should be keyword-wise. Defining your basket of keywords too narrowly is a mistake which means you may never get to start many conversations which could have potentially ended well.
His airline ticket-counter analogy is simple and clever. The message is that when designing your paid-search campaigns you need to pick keywords based on your competitors’ definitions of their brands and searchers’ anticipated behavior as well using your own brand definitions.
If you start with a broader keyword net then you may have thought would be optimal you get the chance to make the cuts where you see poor return. If you start out with a very narrowly defined search campaign you may never get a chance to evaluate some opportunities that would have delivered well.
What the customer thinks they are looking for is sometimes more important than what you think you are selling.
Greg
