Written By Reprise Media | May 13, 2005 | Share This |

In a sense, search engine marketing is the only medium where the consumer requests to see your ad. This suggests a far more captive consumer than you’ll find through any push media. Because the entire SEM channel is keyword-based, the marketer has to anticipate the idea that a user searches and what’s conveyed by each keyword - the consumer’s needs and interests as well as their biases and preconceived notions (consider the fine line between services and products, explicitly recognized by your keyword searches).

Search engine marketing campaigns start with keywords, there’s no denying that. It’s the keywords that create ad inventory and initialize that dialogue between consumers and brands.

So how do you build a proper keyword list? If you know your audience, you most likely have a pretty good idea of your most vital keyword targets. Once you know what works, there’s a ton of keyword suggestion tools out there to help expand your campaign. Some provide recommendations through clustering practices, some feed suggestions from taxonomies created by their search spiders, some might even cross-reference the running lists of what prior users had entered for expansion. Finally, as with Yahoo! and their Matchdriver technology, some of the engines simply feed your submission through their technologies to suggest broad match interpretations. One technology, Wordtracker, uses forward stemming to extrapolate from root terms. It’s a good idea in theory, but in reality, you’ll find a keyword like “hello” will return “hellokitty”, or one more unfortunate, “helloween”. Incidentally, this is the actual example the site offers in their demo. We’re going to guess this particular technology must’ve been built by German metal fans from the 80’s.

So which resources should you be using, and why? You’ll probably want to start with an assortment of services. Google’s tool allows the importation of a long list of keywords, for expansion purposes, while Yahoo! Search Marketing’s tool asks that you enter one term at a time. Wordtracker can turn singular to plural and vice versa, removes hyphenates and similar characters, and also provides misspellings. Searchspell is a resource that specializes in misspellings while Keyword Lizard allows you to hyphenate spaces, remove spaces, add quotation marks to emulate Google’s phrase match convention or brackets to emulate their exact match convention. Finally Yahoo! Search often provides recommendations for additional searches, that might help expand legitimate keywords. Type in “mobile phone” and the results page will suggest you also try “mobile phone tools”,”Samsung mobile phone”, “mobile phone reviews”, etc.

We at Reprise Media don’t necessarily endorse any or all of them over a manual process, ultimately they’re just technologies and nobody really knows where the recommendations come from. We recently plugged a few obvious Father’s Day keywords into the Google suggestion tool and got some interesting results. Our main submissions “Father’s Day”, “Father’s Day gifts” and “gifts for Dad” yielded roughly 400 returns. Many expansions simply built off the main clause of Father’s Day (”father’s day cards”, “fathers day greetings”, “fathers day sale”) and would reasonably be fed into the client’s campaign. Some suggestions worked off established taxonomies, suggesting synonyms like “stepfather”, “spouse” and “daddy”. We can work with those…

Others took related terms and broke them into their composite parts, yielding standalone recommendations like “present”, “homemade”, “birthday”, “crafty”, and “June”. These are all understandable, but might require a bit of legwork to recreate the legitimate search phrases. Once in a while we get a recommendation so out of left field that it blows our minds. At the very bottom of Google’s recommendations lists we found something called “pressie” (some kind of Cockney slang?), a possible sniglet in “marvelicious”, and finally, the piece de resistance of “monkeypox”. This last one suggested an old joke from Carnac the Magnificent (”what do you get the man who has everything”).

Ultimately, as in all walks of life, you should pay attention to the fine print. Google offers the following disclaimer above their suggestion tool:

“Please note that we cannot guarantee that these keywords will improve your campaign performance. We also reserve the right to disapprove any new keywords you add. Keep in mind that you are responsible for the keywords you select and their appropriate and legal use.”

Somehow, this disclaimer feels very closely tied to that ‘monkeypox’ suggestion.

Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.

Topics: SEM: Keyword Generation |