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+1 (778) 798-7815Keywords are the primary way of targeting users through search ads. They enable the users to find their way to their desired service and product and vice-versa.
Naturally, appropriate and accurate keywords help boost your search engine rankings, while inappropriate and inaccurate, i.e. ‘negative’ keywords take things south. This makes targeting the right keywords an essential practice in terms of paid ads and searches because— they bring in the most moolah!
Since false matches cost money in PPC, you need to block them by listing out all the keywords for which your ad isn’t intended a.k.a the negative keywords.
An integral part of the SEO strategy, you can wield negative keywords to your advantage by understanding how your target audience searches, and making use of these specific keywords to effectively reduce wasted clicks. Let’s explore Negative Keywords a bit more!
Types of Negative Keywords:
When you research and start adding negative keywords, all of the search queries containing it won’t be displayed with your ad. This is because negative keywords come in many forms.
- Negative Broad Match
In this keyword type, your ad won’t show if the search contains all your negative keyword terms, even when the terms are in a different order. For instance, if you have the phrase summer outfit, then all the searches that include these two terms— in whichever order— will be excluded.
| Negative Broad Match Keyword | |
| Summer Outfit | |
| Search Query | Could Ad Show |
| Fun Party Outfits | Yes |
| Travel Outfits | Yes |
| Cute Summer Outfits | No |
| Outfit for Summer | No |
| Summer Outfit | No |
This lets you quickly filter out many different variations and combinations. It’s a great way to stop targeting a particular phrase if you notice that it’s performing poorly. Here are some examples of searches that will be excluded if your negative broad match keyword is “summer outfit”:
- Negative Phrase Match
These keywords let advertisers exclude searches that appear in the exact order as your negative keyword, even when the searches have additional words before and after your negative keyword.
Some examples of negative phrase match, when your keywords are summer outfits, are:
| Negative Phrase Match Keyword | |
|---|---|
| Summer Outfit | |
| Search Query | Could Ad Show |
| Fun Party Outfits | Yes |
| Travel Outfits | Yes |
| Cute Summer Outfits | No |
| Outfit for Summer | No |
| Summer Outfit | No |
- Negative Exact Match
As the term suggests, this sub-type lets you target and exclude precisely the keywords you’ve listed to be negative. This means there are no other scenarios in which the search for your ad will be excluded.
| Negative Exact Match Keyword | |
| Summer Outfit | |
| Search Query | Could Ad Show |
| Fun Party Outfits | Yes |
| Travel Outfits | Yes |
| Cute Summer Outfits | No |
| Outfit for Summer | No |
| Summer Outfit | No |
In other words, your keywords need to be completely identical without any additional terms. If the search has your phrase but comes with some additional keywords, your ad will get shown
Now that you have the basics down, let’s understand when is it a good idea to start researching negative keywords—
If you are using Google Ads, negative keywords are a worthy exploration, because they can help in improving the overall performance of your campaign. Having said this, there are three typical situations when you might want to consider focusing on your negative keyword research more:
- Before Launching a PPC Campaign
This is a proactive and good approach that will get you brainstorming your main keywords before setting up the campaign. By incorporating these keywords from the start, you can instantly expect to get better results and save on clicks.
How? When you know which keywords and phrases will bring in the most revenue, you can use them to figure out those keywords that will have poor performance.
- When Your Campaign is already live
If you are clueless about creating your negative keyword list from the very start, you can take action on the fly. Just analyze your campaign and see which irrelevant searches are matching with your ads.
This will help you notice search queries with lots of impressions but only a small percentage of clicks. Simply add them to the list of your negative keywords and you are good to go. Though reactive, this approach works (as well).
- By doing it constantly
Broader negative keywords can definitely help you improve results, but they are rarely enough. You can shift gears by monitoring your campaign closely and mine your search query results by looking at impressions, conversions, and quality scores that will help recognize poor keywords.
This will enable you to spot new opportunities and remove the phrases that are hindering your results.
To sum things up, negative keyword research is something one needs to get into as soon as possible to rank high in search results— and keep at it. It is a fail-proof way of keeping your keyword list “clean” and keep ranking on things that you have reserved your ad spend for.
