What is a negative keyword? Excellent question. They are an important aspect of a healthy PPC campaign.
Consider your keywords. What are they? What do you want associated with your company/brand/product/service? Excellent. Put all those words in an imaginary ‘positives’ list.
Next, think of all the words that you DON’T want associated with your company. These can be anything from unrelated terms, related but irrelevant terms, to flat out ‘bad’ words. Now, put those words in another column and title it, ‘the negatives.’
Now, imagine giving that list of positives and negatives to Google. For the positives you will see your ad pop up. The negatives, on the other hand…won’t. Google now knows, thanks to your list, that you don’t want your ad popping up for those words in search queries.
In a simplistic way, that is the nature of negative keywords. They are lists of keywords that, when searched, you ask Google to never show your ad on in the featured list.
It’s a ‘don’t’ list, if you will.
Why Are Negative Keywords So Important?
Negative keywords help PPC managers to control costs and keep your ad targeting as relevant as possible. As you have probably already deduced, the main reason to include negative keywords is to prevent your ads — and therefore your brand — from showing up alongside search queries that are irrelevant at best and offensive at worst.
So, negative keywords can:
- reduce unnecessary PPC spending
- protect your brand from being associated with distasteful searches
- reduce your bounce rate and improve click-through-rate by weeding out irrelevant visitors
- improve user engagement by making your product or services more relevant
- maintain better ranking health by preventing red flags from appearing to Google (high bounce rate, low click through rate, lack of user engagement, etc)
Our Strategies for Handling Negative Keywords:
We keep a close eye on your search query reports. From these reports, we can assess what searchers are looking for when your ad pops up. If we see words in the query report that don’t fit your buyer persona, we set them as negatives and remove the risk of showing for those again. This is part of our iterative management process.
We know your negative match type. The match type that is assigned to a negative keyword has a huge impact on what type of traffic it blocks. In general, using broad match negatives to block all traffic for a negative keyword is best, but as we hone your campaign we may be able to narrow that to disqualify or include more specific queries.
We apply negative keywords before the campaign goes live. Why waste time with words that we know won’t suit your campaign? Before we launch we compile a list of negative keywords that we continue to refine in the months to come. This list is based on current keyword choices, as well as general lists of negative keywords that should be avoided. You can see some of these lists further on in this post.
We don’t go crazy. Going overboard with negative keywords can damage your campaign just as effectively as not having negative keywords at all.
As we set each negative, we make sure that the user who would search that query is highly unlikely to convert on your site. And again, our constant assessments and refining ensure that we only keep the negative keywords that the campaign needs to remain healthy and thriving.
Ok, so we know what negative keywords are and why they are important. But how do you know what sort of negative keywords you should include in your construction of a PPC account? Here are some examples to give you an idea of what we’re talking about;
Negative Keywords That Every PPC Campaign Should Include
In general, we find that there are some negative keywords that crop up fairly often if we aren’t careful. Some are related to the seedier side of the internet, while others are simply not relevant to your services or product.
The Bad Negative Keywords
Here’s a list of keywords that do NOT belong in any campaign and should be added by default to every PPC campaign. These are the sort of searches that you don’t want any reputable searcher connecting your brand with. Here are a few examples:
free
cheap
nude
naked
sex
porn
torrent
The Employment Search Negative Keywords
Unless your business is one that helps unemployed people find work, having searchers land on your website because they are searching for a job isn’t your best use of funds. Here are some of the common culprits:
hire
hiring
employment
job
career
occupation
full time
part time
recruiter
The Education Search Negative Keywords
While it’s great that people search online in order to find a way to upgrade their skills, it isn’t going to do you any good to have those people landing on your website. Here are some examples of education search negative keywords:
training
class/classes
school/schools
college
university
tutorial
course
Of course, these lists are just a small sampling. In reality, these lists of negative keywords will vary from business to business.
If your PPC manager isn’t incorporating these negative keywords into your campaign, however, it won’t matter how many hours they spent crafting your shiny new PPC campaign. They risk wasting hundreds (perhaps thousands, depending on your budget) each month on unqualified leads – all from not adding negative keywords to their campaign.
If you’re concerned about how your PPC is being run and want to look into outsourcing to a PCC professional, or perhaps you simply need someone to guide you through the process of developing a PPC campaign, contact us. We’ll be happy to sit down with you and discuss how we can help your business grow through the use of paid search campaigns.
Author: Rynn Jacobson
Courtesy: www.fannit.com
