Search Engine Marketing: Bing Review

Well – we’re early into Microsoft’s release of their latest search engine Bing (code name Kumo, formerly known as Live Search, formerly known as MSN Search, etc, etc), but I wanted to give my 2 cents on the early launch.

I’ve found some interesting things, such as try searching on the words “google”, “yahoo”, “aol” or “ask” (all competitors to Bing), and what you’ll get is one single result found for each. At first, I thought that was very impressive and nice of them – but then I realized, it is completely eliminating all of the other components to those such as eliminating their analytics, or eliminating companies that offer Google services, etc… I still haven’t decided whether this is good or bad – just interesting. Now do a search on “bing” – and you get a little bit of everything. One has to imagine that because you’re on Bing already, you’re probably searching for something other than Bing – but who knows. So I did a search on “MSN Search”… Interestingly enough – Live.com was there – but no bing?

Of course the thing I’m interested in the most, is searching on “Media Two”. As you can see from the screen shot – we didn’t quite make the number 1 spot. This is interesting to me, as I know our traffic numbers are greater than the first one (according to Compete we have more than 10x the unique visitors), the name is used in our title tags, description and our URL – whereas the person in the number one spot is missing it in their description… So just another interesting observation, but it appears that a “.com” address holds more weight than a “.net” address.

One feature I do like is the mouse-over effect on the right of the listings… It continues the description from the meta description into a convenient pop up window. This however, is not new technology as places like Ask.com have been doing it with preview windows that even include imagery for a while now. And I do like that the results seem to be fast, and for the most part pretty relevant – but I think that’s been established in the industry for a while… So what is new and great about this search engine called Bing? In their current preview stage, it just doesn’t appear to be the next best thing in search, and until someone comes out with that, they’re still going to called acronyms such as the one I’ve heard twice already this morning: “But It’s Not Google”.

Times are tough. Search shouldn't be.

Despite the bad economy, computers are still popular and Google is still in business. Imagine that…any way, here are some tips to make the most of your search campaigns no matter the current economic condition. These tips are not inclusive nor are they groundbreaking, but hell, our clients aren’t complaining.

Monitor your accounts…every day

Again, probably a no brainer, but with all the automation that Google offers it can be easy to ‘set it and forget it.’ For instance, Google offers an ‘optimize’ ad serving option that automatically shows your ‘best performing’ ads. Google determines performance by CTR. So what if your campaign needs to back to a certain CPA, but some of your highest converting ads have low CTRs? They won’t show. You can’t ignore the human element.

Keep your ad copy fresh and keywords relevant

This suggestion isn’t to say that you need to be changing your ad copy constantly. Let your campaign gain some traction then analyze which ads are not delivering according to your performance metrics. It’s surprising what a few minor changes can do. For example, for one of our clients, I just changed the headline in the ad and left the body the same. It is now the best performing ad in terms of conversions for the month. As for keywords, make sure they are backing out to your goals (clicks? conversions? cpc?). Those goals will determine how you go about optimizing your keywords. General keywords have a tendency to negatively skew metrics, make sure your keywords are relevant to your audience.

Adjust your bids

The search landscape is constantly changing, it’s important to keep a close eye on your keyword bids as competitors are always making moves to secure that prime real estate. So with your performance metrics in mind make the necessary adjustments to remain competitive, but efficient. Another area where Google provides automation, but again, if you’re in your accounts everyday there’s no need.

Ongoing Research

Google offers a variety of helpful research tools when it comes to mining for new keywords. So use them! It may spark new ideas for your campaign. Think about what themes you may be missing from your target market. It’s rare to see a campaign go from start to finish without needing an infusion of ad groups and keywords. You never know, it could save your campaign.

Microsoft’s new SEM toolkit

I might be Johnny Come Lately on this, but I just downloaded Microsoft’s adCenter Ad Intelligence Plug-in for Excel. This is hands down, the best Keyword research tool I have ever seen. I have used them all: Wordtracker, Overture, Google…oh yeah and my own two hands. But rather than exporting lists, searching for dupes, copying and pasting them into Google’s Traffic Estimator to gauge cost, then compiling and formatting them for your own use within each engine UI but also any client proposals, Microsoft (for the first time that I have experienced) has come to the forefront in SEM research tools with their latest excel plug-in, Ad Intelligence, that outperforms any of its competition. It’s one of many new tools they recently unveiled to assist online marketers make more informed, strategic decisions (http://adlab.msn.com/alltools.aspx).
The search keyword research tool utilizes a simple wizard to allow you to generate not only keyword recommendations based on root phrase, site domain or topic, but it also generates estimated impressions, clicks, avg. position, CTR and Monthly Cost! If that weren’t enough you can also select keywords you’d like search query volume for by geographic area and basic demographics.
The days of researching and launching keywords and messaging without much communication with the client are slowly coming to an end. With more and more client-side marketing personnel familiar with search engine marketing, we have been tasked with presenting our research in a more traditional manner…outlining keywords, their potential ad group designation, target demo’s, spend potential, and more… And finally a tool is in the marketplace to help us accomplish this.

SEO

There are a few aspects of SEO that I tend to feel are either misunderstood or not communicated to clients properly:

There are more factors than keyword density that go into how realistic it is that a clients site can appear in the top 10 organic search results:

# of Competitors
Clients rarely look to see how many of their fellow competitors are vying for the same real estate…obviously, the more there are, the more difficult it is to rank highly.

# of Quality Links
Your site must link to and from quality partners relevant to your product/service
Some sites don’t want to divert traffic to another site because they “don’t want to lose traffic”. Trust me, if someone wants to bail, they’re going to bail. Just because you have an external link doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose sales. Quality links will always help you.

The client’s favorite keyword isn’t always the one to focus on. Often times, a clients primary keyword list are not the keywords actually searched by their consumers. That’s why we must research keywords and find those that have a balance between search volume and competitiveness: you want to focus on keywords that are moderately searched and don’t have a ton of competition. If you focus on just high volume keywords you will run into a lot of competition which will make it difficult to rank. So stuck with a moderate balance.

Size does NOT matter
Just because a company/website may be a huge leader in an industry does not mean that they’ll rank well organically. If a tiny advertiser has a site with lots of content, that small business owner will rank higher than the dominant company with Flash intro’s, lots of images, and even a better site experience. SEO doesn’t care about how flashy the site is…it’s just the nature of the beast. This actually leads to the next issue….you ALWAYS have to determine what the goal is. If the goal is the build a killer site with great design, imagery and an overall user experience, you are going to have to sacrifice organic listings….that’s just how it goes. So sometimes if a client wants great graphics and other interactive components, you have to put SEO aside and not worry about it.