Why Marketers Should Use Assist Keywords

Assist keywords can drive your consumers to make that purchase. Here's how.

As travellers we have often come across vague directions to a place. Some dilapidated, many incorrectly spelt, and few pointing the opposite direction! Frustrating? In a word, yes. The fun is ruined if the directions make us go around in circles.

Similarly, for a consumer, the path to purchase is punctuated by twists, turns, roundabouts, and crossroads. During this journey, the consumer has to often find out about the product through intricate search engine result acrobatics. This takes away considerable time and increases the clicks required by consumers, ensuing in indifferent or lukewarm consumers. How do marketers get past this possible block in their ecommerce process?

The trick is to use assist keywords.

Normally, consumers use a flurry of generic keywords to end up on your site. In most consumer search cases, you will find a preliminary search exercise comprising of generic search terms and the next comprising of slightly more specific terms that the user has scouted from your web pages. These primary keywords are the ones that primarily help in hooking your consumer up with relevant information to land on your website. Cool?

For advertisers, it is very hard to know what the searcher’s intent is. For e.g. when they hit ‘Blue Car’ on the search box, do they mean a toy car, a brand called BlueCar or a blue Ford Mondeo? These signals are hard to fathom. With the help of a few assist keywords such as ‘car’ or ‘toy’, advertisers can help reduce the search process, thus reducing the purchase cycle.

Now, on scouring through your analytics graphs and data you will find that a few new keywords, apart from your preliminary keyword list, are used closer toward the purchase process than others. These new keywords are called assist keywords. So in short, assist keywords are used to enrich or boost your keyword inventory, thereby leading to a purchase. Sounds like you’ve hit gold, doesn’t it?

As usual, there are two sides to the coin. The assist keywords can be highly generic (owing to ease of search) in which case bidding for these keywords can be bothersome. But at other times, the assist keywords are specific which means they aren’t exactly mainstream and hence bidding is a breeze.

In some ways these assist keywords are unsung heroes of a brand’s search marketing campaign. They increase the probability of your preferred audience reaching your brand or product portal on fewer clicks. This translates to driving information and thus sales, faster.

However, whatever goes up, must come down and so there’s a downside to all this. There’s no specific way to deduce assist keywords. It only grows from strength to strength depending on the campaign manager’s experience on similar campaigns and the present campaign by itself. Ergo, assist keywords are absolutely vital in tweaking an ongoing search marketing campaign.

So if you want a faster, easier, and lighter search process for your consumers, try assist keywords. They work. Period.

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