Are You Doing Your Negative Keyword Research?

Negative keywords are almost as important as normal keywords. If you’re serious about weeding out the best quality traffic, you’ll need negative keywords.

When we create new campaigns for our clients, we probably spend more time researching negative keywords than we do researching the main keyword list. Long-tail theory dictates that your highest-ROI traffic will come from niche, low-volume, high-quality searches – often 3 or 4 word searches.

The problem with low-volume keywords is that:

a.)  You can’t possibly research what these might be as they are so unique

b.)  Google won’t let you bid on any keyword that has low search volume.

What? Google won’t let me bid on the highest ROI keywords? To a degree, yes – but, as cynical as we are, we won’t hold it against them – server space and processing power would be decimated if these floodgates were opened and it’s simply not practical to even try to go there.

This is where match types come in – using phrase and broad matches, you can get your ads to appear for these searches, but in doing so, you’re going to be targeting a whole load of other searches too… hence the the importance of negative keywords.

Negative Keywords Allow You To Target The Best ROI Traffic

So the only way you can target all the unique, niche, specific searches is by using flexible match types like broad and phrase matches – but these match types require careful filtering using negative keywords, otherwise you’ll end up with a load of irrelevant traffic.

Do Your Negative Keyword Research

So when you’re researching a new campaign using the Google Keyword Tool, don’t just discard the keywords you don’t want – save them as negative exact match keywords instead.

Even this isn’t enough. You should then go through your negative keyword list and identify negative broad and phrase matches – core words or themes that should always be avoided.