Let’s take an example of the search phrase: “shopping deal”

1. Broad search: Your text ad in adwords will show not only for keyword “shopping deal” but also for keywords like “shopping”, “deal” , “hot shopping deal”, “shopping weekend deal” . As you can observe the targeting of keywords is very liberal and the marketing budget can be exhausted very quickly.

2. Exact search: The ad will show only and only for the keyword [shopping deal]. Though this is the exact target keyword, but it is very restrictive in nature and one would need to add too many keywords of similar nature and if one does not, then its a missed opportunity.

3. Phrase search: However if you want to be slightly liberal and target all keyphrases which has the phrase “shopping deal” then its better to opt for phrase search. So the ad will show for key phrases like “hot shopping deal”, “shopping deal Chicago”, etc. Phrase search along with the appropriate negative keywords is pretty effective.

4. Negative keywords: One should include negative keywords like free, jobs, etc. Like if you are selecting keywords related to buying of some software, then you would want -free as a negative keyword. This will ensure that any users searching for the key phrase along with the word free in it are not shown the text ad.

If you have had some other experience with the adowords keyword tool, feel free to share here.

Well you can buy traffic via Google Adwords or other PPC ads of other search engines like Yahoo Search Marketing. However, if you can truly earn traffic by investing in a good website, quality content and do search engine optimization, you will be a winner in the long run.

One should not try and do optimization for too many high traffic keywords but research the right keywords relevant to the business so that only well targeted and focused traffic is achieved and conversions are high.

With PPC advertising via Adwords one can burn lot of cash very quickly and it will probably work only for high ticket items. However, if the product or service price and profit margin is not very high one has to play the SEO cat and mouse game with the search engines. With SEO there is an initial spike in marketing spend but once the ranks have been achieved for the right keywords, one can drastically cut down the online marketing budget and spend a small amount each month or quarter to sustain the ranks else the competition will takeover.

Another big thing is the high CTRs. If one achieves the top 5 ranks in the search results, then the click through rates can be as high as 60% to 90%! And in Adwords, if someone achieves a click through rate of just 1%, it’s a job well done. So you can understand that if someone is only relying on Adwords, then a large chunk of traffic and potential customers are going untapped!

As a part of launch strategy or a short term traffic spike strategy Google Adwords make perfect sense. However, one should also be meticulously planning for SEO as a long term strategy. Many businesses even achieve as high as 80 to 90% of their overall traffic from keyword based search traffic from different search engines and there is no reason why you also cannot achieve high traffic via search engine optimization techniques.

I think in online marketing having a local context can help tremendously. Even if one has a national level business and has a national level marketing plan, it will still make sense to try and have local faces of the business online and then market based on local conditions including using techniques of local search engine optimization.

The chances of success increase manifold since by thinking local one is able to reduce the competition to a great level.

Did not someone say “Think Global. Act Local”.  I think it holds true for online marketing too !!

Let’s take the scenario of buying digital cameras…. My search result expectation would be manufacturers of the digital cameras which would give me info on the latest models and best prices, or a few comparison websites from media companies to provide neutral views….

However if this ideal case scenario truly happened then the manufacturing companies would not need to spend on ppc ads …. That would lead to great revenue loss for search engines… Hence search engines have to keep tweaking the algos to give a fair chance to even not so great websites to feature in the top 10 search results. That would mean that some of the manufacturing and important websites will have to spend on ppc else their business will suffer..

Now if search engines do not ensure good search experience users will switch over !!

Hence the search engines have to constantly balance the act of optimizing user experience and revenue !