This reminds me of an old joke…
Q: “What’s the difference between a duck?”
A: “One foot is both the same.”
Of course that doesn’t really make sense, but in a weird sort of way it does. There are millions of different keywords out there to choose form for any industry. One keyword (or phrase) will (and won’t) work on many different levels for many different companies. Using it wrong can cost you a lot of money and frustration.
Case in point. We were workign with a company that delivered Market Research on a number of different topics.  The topics aren’t important, but the fact that theydid their own market research was. Initially, with the market research keywords they were uing for SEM, they started getting people responding who wanted to be hired for their opinions. These were some of the millions or people out there tryign to get pai for their opinions and nothing else.
This company didn’tactually hire the people to give them their opinions as they performed their market research by other means. Once we closed that loophole with negative keywords and such, they started saving that money.
Another case. We worked with a person who had developed a women’s social network for women that were changing their status or location in life toconnect with others. Her main keyword was “women” and she was spending a huge amount of many with that keyword… Well, after checking her logs and seeing that more than 85% of the traffic from that leyword was bouncing, we discovered (what I had assumed) that she was actually wasting a lot of money on that keyword.
For two reasons.
1. It was too broad a keyword.
2. People who type in “women” in google typically aren’t looking for a women’s social network, if you know what I mean.
After this recommendation, she was well on her way to saving a lot of money on her SEM campaign.
