Pay Per Click – Negative Keywords

We spend a lot of time talking about keywords and how important they are, but with a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign it is equally important to spend time and effort looking at negative keywords. This can help you to target only those people that are really interested in your products and services and help you avoid paying for clicks you don’t need to and a low click through rate because your ad’s are displaying when they shouldn’t be.

This technique basically details which phrases you do not want your advert to appear for, so for example if you are sell used cars but don’t sell vans, then you may use the words van and vans as negative keywords so that people looking for vans don’t click on your advert and cost you money. The benefits of using negative keywords are:

• Reduce unwanted clicks
• Improve your Click Through Rate
• Improve your bounce rate
• Improve your conversion rate
• Help your budget to go further and attract more targeted visitors to your website

First of all you need to work out what your negative keywords will be, one way of doing this is by referring back to your keywords research and seeking out non relevant phrases that have a high volume of searches, one of the most commonly used negative keywords is ‘jobs’. Once you understand what they are you can add them to your PPC campaign to make sure that you do not appear when these words are typed into the search engines.

Make sure you monitor your campaigns consistently so that you can pick up any additional negative keywords that have slipped through the net. It can be more difficult to incorporate if you have double meaning to a word or phrase, for example car service could mean a car garage or repair centre or it could be someone looking for a taxi firm, airport pickup. So you will need to decide based on visitor behaviour from these kinds of keyphrases whether they are worth keeping in your PPC campaign of whether you should rely on organic traffic.