Quite often, we have our clients or fellow advertisers ask our search engine marketing team why do we continue to include brand keywords in our search engine marketing campaigns. Don’t we rank well for them organically, anyway? Are we wasting money bidding on these terms? Here are some reasons why you should include branded terms in your search strategy.
- Real Estate – if you have your brand showing up in the paid section as well as within the organic listings, you will command more real estate on the search engine results page (SERP). Commanding more of the page will give you a leg up over competitors bidding on your brand terms. In addition, you will be able to maintain good positioning if any new competitors begin bidding on your brand terms.
- Increase CTR – this one’s a bit of a no brainer, however, when you have more listings on the SERP, yours is more likely to get clicks
- Quality Score – the fact of the matter is that keywords with high relevance will rate well on the search engines’ quality metrics.
Landing page quality – check, keyword relevancy – check, ad relevance – check, other relevancy factors – check, click-through-rate – check
(If you want to learn more about the importance of Google Quality Score, read Larry Kim’s post in Search Engine Journal)
- Low Cost – with good quality score you can expect to pay less for your brand terms. If the average CPC for your account is around $1.00 you can usually expect to pay a fraction of that for your brand term.
- New Promotions – Another reason to keep running ads triggered by brand keywords is that you can easily promote anything new with your paid search campaign. Whereas organic search listings take time to climb the ranks, with the switch of a button (and some well-crafted ad copy and keyword research) you can instantly promote that new email newsletter or offer with paid search.