I stumbled upon a recent post over at Small Business Search Marketing recently. The post cited a study by Hitwise which indicates that one word searches jumped by 17% in 2009. Keep in mind, these are one word searches that people actually clicked on.
One word search phrases like "olympics" are on the rise.
(Screenshot from a Google Search on 2/26/10)
What are one word search terms?
A one word search term is when someone goes into a search engine and types just one word - say "shoes". You usually don't want to bid on one word search phrases because the person doing the searching is searching on very general phrases and is usually very early in the buying process.
Let's say you're running an online ad campaign for your Denver based running shoe store. You want highly qualified traffic to click on your ads and be delivered to your website. You'll want to bid on terms like "Brooks Beast" or "Asics GT-2140". You don't want to bid on terms like "shoes" - people that type in shoes could be looking for anything from snowboots to sandals. You don't want to waste money on their clicks.
How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?
When you're putting together an online advertising campaign for your small business, you'll want to bid on very specific keywords using exact match or phrase match. You may use broad match for longer keyword phrases. Only in very rare instances would you bid on a one word keyword phrase.