Make Progress In Your Search Engine Accounts

Today’s tip is short, but incredibly powerful. It’s all about attitude and relentlessly staying focused on progress in your Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft accounts. Let me jump right to the tip: Each and every day, no matter how much stuff is going on, force yourself and your team to make meaningful improvements to your search marketing accounts.

It’s Easy To Get Distracted In SEM

This is really logical and obvious advice, right? After all, we’re all hired to manage search engine marketing accounts, right? Well, in theory, but not always in practice from my experience. As a search marketer, we’re really in the middle of it all. SEM as a job includes so much more than campaign management. We train new team members, reconcile invoices, prepare and deliver presentations, attend meetings, prepare roadmaps, forecast numbers, report on numbers, file bugs and feature requests against engineering, and so much more. You get the picture! In this large sea of responsibilities, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in non-revenue generating projects.

All of the stuff I just mentioned is important. However, at the end of the day, what are you really going to be judged on? It’s all about the numbers. Let me repeat that again: Without making a material impact to the search engine accounts and driving improved numbers, all of this other stuff loses a lot of its weight. That’s why I challenge myself and my team each and every day to spend as much time as possible on revenue generating projects that directly improve our SEM campaigns.

What’s My Definition of Progress

While it’s important to work on longer term strategic projects that will generate function step growth patterns, the day-to-day progress I’m referring to here is all about base hits. Think about it. What if you can grow your business a fraction of a percent each day? Now, extrapolate that to the entire year! All of the base hits really add up into huge long-term progress. Some of my suggestions: generate keywords, deploy keywords, refine your structure, test new targeting opportunities, write more granular ad copy, refine bids on top keywords, launch new content match strategies, etc. If you look back after a few weeks and don’t see your account morphing into a much better operation, you’re not doing your job!

Word of Caution: Don’t Go Overboard and Lose Measurability

The cornerstone of SEM is the ability to measure every single thing you do. You can quickly lose this measurability if you make too many changes at once. My closing piece of advice is twofold. First, make sure to stagger your changes so that you can independently measure the success of each change. Second, keep a robust change log in case you need to roll anything back. At the end of the day, it’s all about ownership. When you take full ownership of your SEM accounts, it’s all about making changes each and every day on the path towards PPC account perfection!

Image of Progress © iStockPhoto – patrykgalka