Insights

Wasteful Wednesday with Wil Reynolds #2 – Keyword of the Week: “LLC”

Watch Episode 2 on "LLC":

← Watch Episode 1 on "Jobs"   Watch Episode 3 on "Names" Part I 

Read the Transcript of Episode 2 on "LLC":

What's up, everybody, Wil Reynolds here! I'm back for another Wasteful Wednesday.

Today's Wasteful Wednesday tip of the week is ... ready? "LLC."


Keyword of the Week: “LLC”

So when we look across millions and millions of keywords and we look at 5 or 6 million every quarter, we look for trends. One of the things that we find is when the word “LLC” shows up, usually the data's not too strong on the conversion rates. And here's how this happens.

So people have very generic business names, like my business name is going to be “Philly Network Repair LLC”.

Well, when somebody goes to look me up as a business, and a lot of people search for businesses all day online, they click on your paid ad and you pay for a click for somebody trying to sell you payroll services or something like that.

So let me show you a few examples with an extra special tip that we have found.

Ex. Paradise Networks, LLC

Now, if you're generally going after words like “networks”, I'm telling you I couldn't trigger one this time, but there's a high likelihood you may show up for network type of keywords.

Search Terms: “PVT” and “LTD”

So what I did is I pivoted and I dropped in “PVT” or “LTD”-- these are for companies that are incorporated, oftentimes in other countries, it's a dead giveaway.

But you see the word “IT training” is sitting in here.

PVT LTD

So even if you phrase matched “IT training”, if you're not negating out “PVT”, or “LTD”, you could be showing up for people looking for companies in India. And if you don't sell in India, why are you giving Google that money on those clicks?

Sure enough, there are companies targeting words like “training”, “IT training”, etc. and are getting matched to stuff like this.

💡 Recommended Action: Save yourself a couple bucks, negate “LLC” and “PVT” [from your PPC accounts].

I'll also show you a few other ones.

Ex. Asana vs Monday.com

Search Term: “crunchbase”

Crunchbase

When people search for the word “Crunchbase”, they're [most likely] looking for financial information on a company -- just like we found with most of those LLC and PVT searches.

So [if you’re an Asana competitor], you probably don't want to show up for that ... I get it that you're bidding on a competitor name, but you want to make sure that you're taking a scalpel to that approach and not just broadly spending that money.

Search Term: "revenue”

asana revenue

Same thing with words like “revenue”.

This is somebody doing research on a company's revenue. The odds of them looking to see how much Asana makes and then clicking on [Monday.com] and then converting? Our data says it's pretty slim.

I will tell you, I looked across a bunch of data recently for “LLC” words and found thousands and thousands of dollars spent. Every single person that shared their data with me was at least three to four times over their average CPA (cost per acquisition) and some were as high as fifteen times*.

*Removing unwanted impressions improves CTR, which is a factor in determining Quality Score. Higher quality scores mean lower costs per click, and this translates into more clicks and more conversions without ever changing your budget. Get more insight into the hallmarks of a data-driven keyword strategy here.

Hopefully that is a helpful, Wasteful Wednesday tip of the week so that you can get your money back and use those dollars and cents in better ways. Go save that money. See ya!

Key Takeaways

  • Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to business-like terms.
  • Negate terms like “LLC”, “PVT", "LTD”, “revenue”, etc. -- especially when you're bidding on a competitors brand name -- to improve Quality Score and Landing Page Experience.

 

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Wil Reynolds
Wil Reynolds
CEO & Vice President