When it comes to pay per click advertising, it is important to ensure that you are being seen for your own name. Seems like a no brainer, right? Surprisingly, one of the most common misconceptions I hear (almost daily) is when clients’ tell me they already show up in the organic search results under their own name; thus there is no need to spend additional advertising dollars. This could not be any further from the truth. Here are just a few reasons why it’s extraordinarily beneficial to bid on your own name.

• Showing up under both the organic and paid results in a search engine will reinforce your brand, as well as add credibility to your company.
• Not all searchers are the same, and therefore search behavior will be unique across the board. Some will only click on paid ads, while others only organic ads. You ought to appear in both areas so as not to lose potential eyes to your site!
• It is perfectly legitimate and quite prevalent in the world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for your competition to bid on your name. Google and Yahoo are 2 of the main players today and also hold the largest online market share; according to a recent article which revealed Google at 69 % and Yahoo at 19%. Both engines permit this activity, which means that a competitor can snatch away your searcher without doing anything illegal; provided they do not use your actual name in their ad copy.
• As many as three paid listings can appear above a natural result, which will allow any company the chance to lure your prospective customer away. Keep in mind: this is a customer who was initially looking for YOU!

Online Advertising has become increasingly competitive. If you want to make a name for yourself, it is essential to stay ahead with your competition! How does that old saying go? If I had a nickel for every time people told me it was not necessary to bid on their company name…

Lately I’ve been hearing the same question from a lot of my clients, “What do you do to optimize my paid placement campaign?” Well at this point of my career, I don’t feel I’m ready to give away the formula to the secret sauce, but I would like to give our readers some pointers. This will be part of a five-part blog, that will give tips on things to look for when making tweaks and “cutting the fat” from your campaigns. The best way to get top performance from your campaign is to start optimizing when you first launch. The first data you see is a great way to predict where the campaign is headed.

#1 Make Sure Your keyword Avg. Position is where you want to be.

When first launching your new PPC campaign, give your campaign a few hours before going in and making any changes. If you’re bidding at $0.50, you can then go in and see where your ads are showing up based on the keywords you chose to run and begin to get an idea of how competitive your keywords are. If the average position for your keywords is higher then ten, you’re probably not getting many clicks or impressions. If your goal is to sell your products, generate leads or get users to sign up for a newsletter, you need more searchers to see your ads to give your ad more chances to be clicked on. The best thing would be to raise your keyword bids to $1.00, but only for those keywords that are over an avg. position of six. This should raise your average positions which will provide you more impressions and more clicks. To keep from overspending, you may want to lower your daily spend.

My second recommendation will be posted in my next blog which should be up in early November

George McFly * couldn’t have said it any better on that cool November afternoon in Hill Valley, California. Little did he know that your Density – that is, your click density, is in fact your destiny. If it’s not currently part of your web analysis, keep reading.

“Click Density” can be defined as “How Visitors are Interacting with my Website”, in a visual representation. If you’re like us here at MoreVisibility and use Google Analytics all the time, you’ll be able to use the Site Overlay report to see where visitors are clicking, and then, where they are clicking after that.

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