Thursday, May 05, 2005

Search marketing tips from Search guru Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee from Did-It shared these tips at the Search Engine Strategies conference. He always has sage advice whenever we've chatted.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are the places you need to concentrate your efforts. At every instant throughout every day each bid can be only too high, too low or just right. There are many PPC budgets; (1) pure direct marketer, search budget is "carte blanche"; (2) fixed budget marketer, (3) cross media or hybrid marketing budget. The first mistake made by marketers when doing SEM is forgetting to think like their prospects. Second mistake is using the wrong success metric; think about immediate orders, lagged orders, and so on. Make sure to do your keyword research, go deep. Make sure to fine tune your creative, do it constantly. Do not send ALL your traffic to your homepage. Then make sure to test your landing pages. There is a major issue with setting daily budget caps, in that it randomly picks keywords not to show up, but in reality you want your best keywords to come up first. You must measure and manage granularly. Do not simply measure on average, break it out and look at specifics to improve your overall average. Do not neglect localized opportunities. Do not only use broad match in Google, be specific. Bidding emotionally is a bad idea, do not outbid out of spite. By avoiding those mistakes, you will realize great success.

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