Beware the CEO EGO!

Keyword Analysis is probably the most important and difficult part of any Search Engine Marketing project - whether SEO or Paid Search. Tony Wright's article "Ego Bidding Gone Wild" reminded me of a slide I have in my presentation deck when talking about B2B Search Engine Marketing; the one called 'BEWARE the CEO EGO'!! The CEO EGO manifests itself in three ways:

• The desire to show up ahead of the competition (as mentioned in Tony's article)
  
• The desire to show up for the cool words that are in the company mission statement
  
• Their desire to be #1 for their own name - in every country, language and time zone

I wanted to expand on #2 a bit. Most of the companies in the valley where I live are trying to break into a 'new' market or create a 'new' industry category. The words they use in their press releases and company profiles are words that no searchers would be caught dead entering into a search box. The searchers use the legacy words; the exact words the company wants to see replaced with their new, cool keywords. It is also possible, and I have seen this happen, that the CEO is in complete denial that there is a legacy world that they are playing into. This is a similar disease to the one that has the executives of the company believing that they don't have any competition.

Convincing the CEO that they should use the legacy words on their website or in their ad copy is a tough sell. If the CEO decides 'NO WAY', then the lead flow volume will be lower and the quality of the leads will be lower. WebMama.com has lost clients over the fact that we spent $10K of their money to develop their keyword strategy, and the results tell them they should put the very words they seek to replace in prominent locations online. Oh well...