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Wasteful Wednesday with Wil Reynolds #7 – Keyword of the Week “Acronyms”

Watch Episode 7 on "Acronyms":

← Watch Episode 6 on "Names" Part II | Watch Episode 8 on "Reopening" →

Read the Transcript of Episode 7 on "Acronyms":

Howdy friends! Wil Reynolds here for another Wasteful Wednesday.

This Wednesday, we're going to talk about acronyms -- they're not your friends. So let's go over and show you how acronyms could be jacking up your ROI in your paid search accounts..


Keyword of the Week: “Acronyms”

Query: “HCM”

What you'll see here is "HCM", and Google believes that is about hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but it obviously also means something else because we've got companies like Oracle, isolvedhcm.com and Microsoft spending a lot of money to show up for this word.

Google thinks it might mean something else.

This is why my friends, you want to bring down your search terms, calculate the length and make sure that you're not showing up for some words, that might mean something different in one industry than another.

All right, so let's go for another word.

Query: “BPM”

BPM = beats per minute, duh (or not!)

"BPM online courses" "compare BPM products". Going after broad words like this will crush your damn ROI.

That will result in you saying something like paid search doesn't work, but it could, if you didn't go after words like this.

I also gotta remind you, there are times where you're going to want to break down those search terms into separate unigrams and then look at those words.

Query: “ERP”

Let me show you an example of how it can creep up on you and mess with your ROI.

Here I'm looking at Navy ERP jobs.

I'm not sure that SAP wants to pay like $30 per click -- who wants to pay $30 a click or whatever it costs for that query? Not me.

The Navy people are looking for jobs with the Navy. Kill that noise...

Remember: Acronyms aren't your friends!

Key Takeaways

  • Use your SEO and PPC data together to identify whether or not your PPC ads are matching to acronym terms.
  • Negate terms like “BPM”, “ERP”, 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