The Journey to the Top of the SERP

I currently work in the marketing department at my company and focus on our digital brand building efforts.  The part I like best about my role is looking at our results and figuring out what could be tweaked to improve performance.  Should we try a different banner for that audience?  Should we have the rich media ad play automatically?  We can make all those changes and then monitor without having to wait months for the results, which ultimately improves the performance of our overall program.    

Since I like this part of my job so much, I was especially excited to learn more about paid search in my Internet and Interactive Marketing Class.  With digital brand building, we make optimizations and run tests every few months.  With paid search, there are test and learn opportunities almost daily.  A recent article from ClickZ outlines just a few tactics to improving return on investment with paid search.  Many of these tactics can be implemented almost immediately and results follow soon after, which is very appealing for marketers.

Another thought I had after reading the content this week is how a company selects its keywords. A few obvious considerations include knowing your brand strategy as a marketer, choosing keywords that are necessary to compete in your category and buying your brand terms. A few other thoughts I had were using social listening tools to find how consumers describe your brand and your competitors in blogs and on forums. Another way might be to listen to consumers in focus groups and how they describe the brand and its functionality in their lives.  

Also regarding keywords, I found this infographic from WordStream on the most expensive keywords that I thought was extremely interesting.  I was surprised that the top 3 were all financial services industries, although it does make sense that consumers would want to do a lot of research before making a decision on insurance and loans.  I was also surprised that automotive didn't make the top 20 given how much they spend on advertising overall.

I am looking forward to being able to more intelligently discuss paid search in some of my future meetings.  After this week, I am more certain than before that paid search is definitely an area I'd like to learn more about as a digital marketer.