Monday, February 28, 2005

Those keywords are there for a reason, you know

Marketing guru Seth Godin uses screenshots to illustrate a really simple point: A lot of companies are using keyword advertising at Google stupidly. He points out something all companies should keep in mind, and especially small artistic ones, where budget is a constant concern, which is that setting up on the web is not like opening a retail store, where you stock one big room and hope that customers show up and dig through it all. On the web you're in fact building a tiny little store for each and every thing you sell, and should be able to anticipate your customer wanting that one item before they have to go search for it themselves. This is the entire point of keyword advertising at Google, he rightly argues, not to simply sponsor a bunch of general words that all take you to the same general site.