It seems like a no brainer to me, yet without fail, I often get asked this question. I typically get into a debate (albeit a friendly one) as to why an online branding campaign is nothing short of essential. The truth of the matter is that many online marketers are rather hesitant to bid on their own names, however, it is imperative to do so in order to protect your brand. The common response is: “But I am already number 1.” Even if you are ranking number 1 organically, you should still bid on your name! Here are a few facts to convince you why it is extraordinarily beneficial to do so:

• It is perfectly legitimate (and happens quite frequently) for competitors to bid on your name. The engines permit this activity, which means that a competitor can lure away your searcher without doing anything illegal; provided they do not use your actual name in the ad copy. Keep in mind: this is a customer who was initially looking for YOU! If that is not reason enough, keep reading…
• It reinforces your brand and adds credibility.
• It is relatively inexpensive. Most engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) make it so you are likely to get the best deal on your own company and product names, which results in a lower CPC.
• It is good to cover your bases. In other words, if your organic results drop as algorithms change, you will maintain your online brand presence with your paid listing. Even a well optimized website cannot achieve top positions for every variation of the company name or brand all of the time.

Do not give a competitor the opportunity to snatch away your visitor. Be sure to bid on your name! Oh and while you’re at it, you might want to create a competitor campaign. Remember, it is perfectly acceptable to give your competition a run for their money!

If you ask most companies who are doing search engine marketing what ad position works best, the overwhelming response would be number one.  Companies are always competing to be in top positions and most want to be number one.  However, you have to ask to yourself when doing search engine marketing if ad position one will work best for your company. The proper way to find out is to run some tests. How well do your campaigns perform when you’re at position one relative to positions 3 or 4?  The type of business you have can affect how well you do in certain ad positions as well. It affected a real life furniture company.

A furniture company which we’ll call “The Sofa Company” started out bidding for positions 1-2. They were doing okay, but somehow there was a feeling they could do better. When we targeted ad positions 3-4 their click thru rate increased. What’s the reasoning? Most people when shopping for furniture don’t buy the first piece they see, they do comparison shopping and then buy. “The Sofa Company” did well because by the time people got to them at position 3-4 they were more ready to buy and because the “The Sofa Company” had good prices, they were able to make the sale. This doesn’t work for every company. Other companies only do well when they’re in the top 2 ad positions. Ad positioning has to be explored on a case by case basis. The best way to know is to test. You may be surprised to find that for your particular company ad position 3 works best.

If you haven’t been on Google.com in the past couple of days, you have yet to see their new tool, Google Suggest. This addition is aimed to give searchers recommendations of what keywords to search upon. Results are determined based on algorithms that can ascertain query predictions. For example, when I go to Google, attempting to search for “Orlando Hotels,” I only have to type four letters until I see my desired keyword:

So what does all this mean for Search Engine Marketing? Easy… you can now pretty much rule out bidding on and paying for any misspelled keywords. In addition, you can get a very good grasp on how competitive a search keyword will be based on the results provided in green. For example, understanding how popular a given keyword is on the World Wide Web can help in determining its potential competitiveness and, therefore, picking the minimum and maximum Cost per Click (CPC) amount. Lastly, Google Suggest acts almost as a keyword research tool, providing anyone building a campaign with additional keyword recommendations, based on what other terms show up in the Suggest drop-down.