Make 2013 the year you tighten your ads, build your keyword lists, and firm up your SEM results
Editor’s Note: Chelsea Boryca, senior creative strategist at Yahoo! Search, shares proven ways that marketers on the Yahoo! Bing network can boost their performance and results in 2013.
Most people make New Year’s resolutions to hit the gym and get in shape. If you’re a search engine marketer, you probably added another vow: Make 2013 your strongest year in search ever. You have new search goals, budgets, and a steely determination to take your search campaigns to the next level. But where do you start? That’s where we can help.
Here are five tips that will help you whip your search campaigns into shape and beef up your results in the New Year:
- Partner up: Workouts are better with a buddy, and so is SEM! If you feel like your resources are stretched thin then it’s always a good idea to talk to your account team about your goals and how to reach them. You’ll get more done and accelerate your account’s performance. We have expertise and proprietary tools to help you with optimizations, keyword expands, uploads, reporting— It’s like having a personal trainer for your campaigns!
- Dig deep and go hard: Are you looking at trends and optimizing performance on a daily basis? If not, you should be. The search marketplace can be volatile and major changes can occur at the drop of a hat. Don’t catch yourself reacting to a marketplace shift a week after it’s already impacted your performance. Feeling overwhelmed by the data or time spent? Refer to tip number one!
- Load up on keywords: Mom always said “Quality keywords are the building blocks of a high-performing account.” Well, maybe that was just my Mom. But the fact remains that one of the best ways to improve quality in your account is to add keywords. Monitor search query reports weekly or monthly for new keywords and negatives. This way, you’ll increase your good impressions (adding keywords produces more volume and ensures they’re mapping to the right ads), while decreasing your bad impressions. This is one of the most common optimizations we do for clients. Why? Because it works!
- Change it up…only if you need to: Have you ever launched a restructure of your account and wondered why your performance dipped so sharply in the beginning? One reason is the emphasis that the Bing Ads platform puts on history when it comes to calculating quality. You don’t necessarily lose your history when you restructure, but it takes the system some time to learn the new structure and recalibrate. Kind of like getting used to a new workout routine after months of the same exercises. Ask yourself if there is a definite need for a restructure before taking on this optimization. If the answer is “yes,” ask your Yahoo! account team to help you make sure that your new restructure is using all our best practices. That will give you the best chance for success and help your hard work pay off.
- Consistency is key: Remember my tip about how Bing Ads prefers keywords with history? Make sure you adopt an always-on search strategy. Repeatedly turning an account off and on makes it difficult to achieve optimal efficiency. Keep the lights on, optimize, and it won’t be long before you see the results.
With the tools and resources (that would be us) to help you succeed in 2013, you can now confidently resolve to take your search campaigns to new heights and achieve some great results. Happy New Year!
(Image by BazarrBizarreSF via Flickr CC 2.0)
