Watch Episode 1 on "Jobs":
Read Transcript of Episode 1 on "Jobs":
What's up, friends, Wil Reynolds here for Wasteful Wednesday!
Every Wednesday I'm going to show you the most egregious example of a word that I found that week that you probably want to negate in your accounts to make sure you're not wasting money on keywords that aren't performing for you, when you can go ahead and put that into other tactics that have a higher ROI.
Keyword of the Week: “Jobs”
SaaS guys and girls, when you target competitor names, you gotta make sure you understand what other types of things you might be showing up [in search results] for.
Because when you target that competitor name, some people typing in that name are looking for jobs. There's no better place to find out what intent is than Organic Search on Google.
So let me go show you an example.
Ex. Asana
I pulled up Asana, and I'll show you how some companies are getting their signals mixed up, probably incurring clicks and costs they don't want.
Even Asana, the brand themselves, might be able to make some tweaks to how they're showing up for their own paid search ads.
Search Term: “asana careers”
I had to go three pages deep, no ads, good job everybody.
But one of the things I noticed is that people were searching for specific [job titles] like “software engineer”.
Search Term: “asana software engineer"
So I searched for “asana software engineer” and Asana is showing up.
That's cool, right?
But your [ad copy] is talking about “manage all your projects and tasks” -- ummmm, I'm a software engineer?
Isn't it interesting that Google has all this information?:
- Engineering Jobs Page
- Asana Jobs Page
- Glassdoor
- Greenhouse Job Application
Google's learned that for all the people that search for “asana software engineer”, there's a good chance that they actually want a job and not [to sign up for / learn about] the software.
So you want to make sure (as Asana) that you're using SEO and PPC data together to be able to find that out.
There's one way to make sure of that -- negate the word "jobs". But that's the easy [way out].
Everybody can negate the word "jobs" or "careers", but how are you going to find all the different derivatives [of those terms]? This is how you do it.
Search Term: “product designer”
The other thing I noticed was for “Asana product designer”.
Same thing, right?
Look at all these different jobs. [Look at all the different ways you can apply for those jobs] -- via Glassdoor, Greenhouse, etc.
Also, notice: “what does a product designer do at Asana”. We got another query there.
💡 Recommended Action: Asana might want to change that ad copy -- tweak it up a bit [to match varying search intent].
Bonus Tip: Check Competitors Brand Keywords
But more importantly, Monday (which is a tool that Seer uses, actually, we love it), they bid against Asana's brand name.
You can see that they're bidding to tell somebody why Monday is so much better, “Import & Sync Your Work Easily” ... but this is somebody looking for a job.
💡 Recommended Action: Monday.com you probably want to look at this & make sure you're not showing up for competitors' career searches.
And so much more -- I'm literally just getting started.
But the words like “software designer”, “product designer”, but then you've got words like “Glassdoor”, “LinkedIn”, “HR”, you've got all these different words.
You have interview questions. I've seen people searching for brand name and interview questions and other companies are showing up.
All these things are in jobs. So look through your search query report for those, negate those and get your money back.
ICYMI: Watch Wasteful Wednesday Episode 12: "Jobs Part II" to dive into more career-related terms to negate!
Key Takeaways
- Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify if your keywords are matching to "jobs" terms -- these might be driving up your CPAs while negatively impacting quality score and CTRs.
- Unless your ad copy reflects job-like intent, negate "jobs" and similar terms like “apply”, “career”, etc. -- especially when bidding on competitors' brand terms.
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