Imagine our surprise when we found out that mere days after our expansion into the Boston area, that searching for “Fat Ugly People” on some search engines was returning Acsys Interactive as the number one search result. Even more baffling, it was a paid search result. Yes, that’s right, Acsys appeared to be paying for the right to be associated with fat and ugly. Needless to say, we were confused.
The explanation? Our newest employees, Jeff Johnson and Joan Wilson, formerly of BigBad, Inc., were naturally a welcome addition to the crew. Little did we know that the name “BigBad” would be a loose fuzzy keyword match for such search engine phrases as “fat ugly people” and “bad ass”.
The fix was simple, and part of any good search engine marketing process. We added negative search keywords to the paid search campaign, meaning that we can specifically exclude key phrases from our paid ad results. This illustrates the importance of executing regular reviews of your web analytics reports. In doing so, you can continually improve the success of your paid search keywords. Fortunately, we practice what we preach and thus were able to quickly detect the undesired association.
Ironically, this blog post by virtue of its title and text also runs the risk of re-associating the site with that odd keyword combination. Given the sensitive nature of that association, our marketing folks paid close attention to this post’s release to ensure they were comfortable with the results.