Our media agency recently gave me a big long list of keywords so we could start a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign to drive traffic to our site. The list was long, very very long. It took about 6 A3 pages to print the list off and the search terms were related to our brand, food products that we sell as well as recipes for those products.
The problem was that the list proposed that we use the following search terms:
- our brand name
- a ton of keywords relating to the products we sell as well as some terms that were less related to the products we sell
- spelling errors on those search terms
- lists of one word search terms
- copy that promised recipes and meal ideas for the products
Now this may not seem that ununusal but after looking at the list of search terms, there were a number of flaws with in the list. The issues were:
- The terms were very broad
- They were not very targeted
- Some keyphrases contained negative keywords
- The destination URL did not provide the information promised in the ad copy
- The recipes that we had on the site had been moved to another site and therefore would not be relevant to the searcher if they clicked on the ad
What surprised me the most is that the keyword list essentially showed a fundamental lack of understanding of our business and our objectives. Funny as the agency we deal with is a top notch agency, is one of the biggest media agencies in town and has dealt with our business for over 10 years. It seemed that they were more interested in using the money that they saved us from our television campaign on our online campaign.
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