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Using Negative Keywords To Better SEO Your Site
By Patrick Hare
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-11-30
The first thing any Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign should include is a good list of keywords. The second thing it should have is a list of negative keywords. This is because there is a lot of search traffic on engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and not all of it will be profitable for your site's business model.
Briefly stated, Negative Keywords should include things that you don't sell, won't do, or won't make money selling online.
For instance, if you sell Men's Shoes but not Tennis Shoes, you would use the term "tennis" as a negative. Similarly, if your shoe store did not sell Rockport, Timberland, or Reebok shoes, you would create a list in Google Adwords that might look like:
-rockport
-timberland
-reebok.
The -sign in the list indicates that any instance of that particular word (or phrase) in the search query should keep your ad from showing. Any time you are going after a phrase that may have different meanings to a lot of different people, the use of negative keywords is highly encouraged. Additionally, if there is a large aggregate of low-volume keywords that aren't relevant to your products and services, you should be adding those into your excluded list as well. Even if you have a low cost-per-click, the use of negative match keywords keeps you from paying for site visitors who aren't going to convert into sales.
What are some guidelines for using negative keywords? This can be a bit complex, depending on your industry. If you're selling new products, you might add a negative for "antiques." If you're a contractor, you want to add "jobs" as a negative, and probably would slip "DIY" into your list as well. If you're selling high end goods you would exclude "cheap" but if you're selling low end stuff, then "premium" might be a negative keyword. If there's any chance that your products and services overlap with anything on the seedy side of the internet, there is a good chance that your negative keyword list will have a wide range of phrases you wouldn't be caught using in front of your grandmother.
In many engines, negative keywords can be added at the ad group and the campaign level. It is very important to note that negative keywords should only be added at the campaign level if the negatives are relevant to every single keyword in the campaign. Our PPC specialists have seen many cases where a campaign negative was filtering out traffic that would otherwise have been profitable. This is why it is a good idea to avoid blindly copying campaigns without checking their settings, since what should definitely be negative for one campaign may strangle the lead/sales volume on a campaign that is otherwise very similar.
Where can you get your own list of negative keywords? If you have Google Analytics installed, you can look under Traffic Sources>Keywords to see the words and phrases that are leading people to your site. If you see keywords that are incorrect for one reason or another, and they are less likely to result in sales, then you may want to remove them. Keywords that give you profitable natural search traffic can be very unprofitable in PPC if there is a high volume but a low conversion rate, since the cost of natural traffic is sometimes determined only by the cost of your server bandwidth. If you're starting from scratch, Google Adwords has a keyword tool that lets you select negative keywords (and positive ones) from a list of recent searches, and import them directly into your Ad Group or Campaign. Likewise, Bing (MSN Adcenter) and Yahoo! Search Marketing also have similar tools for acquiring negative keywords.
The negative keyword filter can turn a bad campaign into a good one in a matter of minutes. It could be costing you several dollars per click to drive poor or irrelevant traffic to your website. This can also be hurting your Google Quality Score, because Google does not want to send visitors to sites that aren't relevant. Though it seems counterintuitive for Google to turn away wasteful spending, Google's business model is built on trust in relevant results, so you may get a lower Adwords quality score if you're not creating a good user experience by excluding bad traffic. Lower quality scores result in higher costs per click and worse positions on the sponsored results, so a good list of negatives can not only improve your ROI for paid traffic, it can also improve your visibility and reduce your CPC. As the economy improves and the paid search market becomes more competitive, a well-tuned PPC campaign will be even more necessary for squeezing the margin out of your online sales.
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About the Author:
Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group.
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