Sticking to What You Know

Staying within your expertise is a way to increase your chances of success in business. For example if I am a Dentist, my expertise is teeth. Be it the ability to whiten teeth, straighten teeth, etc, a dentist is a pro in his field. What about a financial advisor, again that person is a pro in their field. They live and breath stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and have years of experience advising clients on how to meet their financial goals and planning for those events. The experience and advice of a pro in their field is invaluable. Think about it this way, would you trust the advice your financial advisor gives you on the proper way to repair a chipped tooth, would you want him to fix it for you if he offered? Same with the dentist, would you put your nest egg into a tip you received while you were sitting in your dentist’s chair for a routine cleaning?

The point is stick with what you know and you will have success. Certainly I am biased, but I have a hard time understanding why many business owners feel they can have the same success at their search engine marketing campaigns as company that does SEM for a living. SEM is highly complex and time consuming, while Adwords has made it very easy for the average person to set up and run a campaign, which may be okay depending on the goals of your campaign, but if you are a business and your goal is to generate a positive ROI, isn’t it better off left to the professionals.

Think about what is entailed in an average campaign. If you are running your own campaign now, have you thought about yield scenarios for each bid position across the major search engines. If your campaign is 200 words with 5 separate bid positions, that’s 5 to the 200^th power calculations that you need to consider. Now take those same calculations and start applying them to every search engine, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, do you know which words are generating a positive ROI in which position, at which time of day, on which search engine? If not, then isn’t your search campaign better off left to the professionals? If you want to get the most ROI possible and best your competition, then I certainly I would consider seeking out a company to discuss SEM with them.