Watch Episode 17 on "Government":
← Watch Episode 16 on “Why” | Watch Episode 18 on “Laws” →
Read the Transcript of Episode 17 on "Government":
What's up friends, Wil Reynolds here for another Wasteful Wednesday.
Today we're talking about the gobment, G-O-B space M-E-N-T, the gobment.
We're going to talk about government websites.
One of the reasons why I believe that Seer has been able to save our clients $30+ million in inefficient spend is because we are constantly trying to understand the interplay between paid and organic search.
Keep in mind, I've been at this for three and a half years, almost four years now, where by combining these things, we're able to find insights that other marketers just may not know are happening around them if they only focus on the paid data that they're given from the platforms.
So let me go ahead and show you how the government might be messing with your campaigns.
Keyword of the Week: "Government"
Query: "cooling water"
Let's take a word, "cooling water".
Now, we've got everything from water coolers to thousand dollar water tanks to small little bottles that cool your water to music?
Yeah, surprise, a lot of key words mean different things to different people in different industries.
So if I'm getting ready to click on this and I accidentally, whoops, click on that. Well, you're paying a lot of money for me to click on something that I'm not remotely interested in.
Then also we've got touchless, pure water. I think that's probably corporate something you might want to say you're corporate, if you are, I'm afraid to click on it, cause I don't want to cost you any money, but then down here I've got computer water cooling, custom PC water cooling.
Um, what? Then I've got a three-stage water cooler, which I don't know what that is.
So cooling water seems to be a little bit all over the place, but this is about the government, let me show you what triggered this for me to find this.
As you scroll through, obviously you see music videos, problem, but then very quickly I got to epa.gov.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Especially at this time, my friends. [One of our clients] told me about how the CDC's website started showing up for transmission keywords, and it's like, Oh right, people might be looking for transmissions for cars, but people are also looking for things related to COVID transmission.
So Google's very smart machines, go "wait a second, the word transmission starts to mean something differently," and started showing .govs.
Ding, ding, ding
When a .gov domain is ranking in the top 10 for a term where you don't really compete with the government, or you don't think someone would look for a government website to solve their problem -- that's a trigger. [You should probably adjust your PPC spending accordingly].
My point is take your PPC data, check all your organic data next to it. Look at who's showing up and you can start to find at scale some of those types of websites that are showing up that probably could be an indicator to do just a little bit of a deeper dive.
I hope that saves you a little bit of cash this Wednesday, I'll be back next Wednesday.
If you have a hypothesis, leave your comments down below, cause I can scan 7 million keywords and the top 20 or 30 for all 7 million of those along with all other kinds of data points in seconds.
You give me your hypotheses and if it can hold water, then I will go ahead and record a video so we can share it with everyone else, and we can all build the world's biggest list of negatives to save all of us money at this time.
Take care, enjoy your Wednesday. Have a wonderful, wonderful freaking Wednesday. See ya.
Key Takeaways
- Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to terms targeting .gov sites.
- Spending money on terms that aren’t relevant to your business, isn’t just bad for you bottom-line, but your user experience, when you rank for a top result and NOT answer the searcher’s query.
- Leverage our Saving Benjamin™ Lite tool to find more negative keywords in your PPC accounts.
- Keep watching Wasteful Wednesday episodes here!
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