Hiring a search engine marketing professional can be expensive but it could be a lot cheaper than using Google's "Free" advice.

Towards the backend of 2009 Google introduced the Opportunities tabs to Google Adwords Accounts. This gives Adwords advertisers ‘a list of automated ideas, customised for your account' after Google's analysis your budget, keywords and campaign performance. The tab shows eager advertisers all the potential searches they're missing out on, with a view of the competition they face and a cheerful smiley face showing if that keyword is relevant, which it surely must be if Google, the lord and master of relevancy, has analysed your account performance, budget and keywords and selected the most relevant keywords for your business.

The danger (referred to in our title) is that those people who automatically assume that these keywords must be ever so relevant and good, then nonchalantly add them all to their account, could be in for a nasty surprise. As this screenshot illustrates, Google suggests for a Japanese Chopsticks AdGroup keywords like ‘easy chopsticks', ‘Japanese recipes', ‘buy Japanese products' and so on, all with some degree of relevance but wholly inappropriate for our ‘Japanese chopsticks' offer.

A client recently handed me over their Adwords account to sort out after such an exercise. The client's business relates to providing sensory products to people with special needs, a fairly focused business. I found in the campaign keywords like "adults stuff", "baths bathrooms", "bathrooms installation", "showrooms bathrooms", "cheap disco lighting", "disco dance lights", "disco dj light", etc., which all had absolutely no relevance to the clients business, but were all driving relatively expensive, frequent and wholly inappropriate traffic to the site, depleting his budget and pushing his more relevant keywords out of visibility for large parts of the day.

Furthermore, because the default setting for adding these keywords is ‘broad' and the client had left it like that, when I ran a search query I found such actual search queries as:-

• aboriginal people and their physical features
• adult gadgets
• colonic irrigation in children
• dating problems for people with learning difficulties
• famous people with learning disabilities
• 10 physical things 10 human things
• free autistic resources
• image of people physical
• b and q bathroom fitters bristol
• bath showroom east grinstead
• bathroom fitting cardiff
• bathroom showrooms
• outdoor solar fairy lights
• bathroom carpet
• vinyl flooring

Needless to say none of these(or –very- many others), whilst demonstrating some relationship, had any real relevance to our clients business.
The simple motto from this tale is: hiring a search marketing professional may be expensive but it certainly can be a lot cheaper than using Google's "Free" advice.