At Cognito, like most offices around the country, we are gripped with March Madness fever. When the tournament kicked off Thursday and Friday, we all spent the afternoon feverishly watching the games and checking our respective brackets working.

March brackets are not just for college basketball teams. They are also for integrated marketing and communications firms. We chose 64 words and phrases from our media pitches, interviews, blogs, press releases and marketing content carefully. We organized four thematic quadrants – retirement/savings, investing, product/asset class, and markets.

The words we chose are how people find websites and blogs for asset managers. Think “how to invest in mutual funds,” or “best fixed income funds.” There are also common financial news terms such as “bond market outlook,” or “S&P 500.”

How will we decide what words are best? With data, of course! We used SEMrush, the world's leading competitive research service for online marketing, to track keyword rankings in search engines to help better understand how users are finding websites. Each round takes a different online search metric to determine the match’s winner.

The first round, to be held later this week, will be based on cost-per-click (CPC), or the average price in USD advertisers pay for a user’s click on an ad triggered by the given keyword (Google AdWords).The following rounds will be as follows:

Round 2: Search volume, or the average number of search queries for the given keyword in the last 12 months.

Round 3: Competitive score, or the competitive density of advertisers using the given term for their ads.

Round 4: Results, or the number of URLs displayed in organic search results for the given keyword.

Round 5: Keyword difficulty index, an estimate of how hard it is to rank well in organic search results.

Championship round: An overall assessment of metrics judged by Cognito.