Accentuate the Negative

MoreVisibility - August 13, 2008

Since working at MoreVisibility, I’ve had the opportunity to look at the many different aspects of client campaigns in order to determine the most effective search engine marketing strategy. When walking through the door, every client has a different level of understanding and experience with search engine marketing.  While some clients tend to pay attention to the ads, other clients may be more concerned with the keywords.  One area of particular importance that many clients do not even know about, are negative keywords.  I call negative keywords the ‘unsung heroes’ of the campaign.  Negative keywords are keywords or phrases that are added to the campaign that prevent the ad from showing when they are entered into search queries.  By adding negative keywords you will be eliminating a large amount of irrelevant searches or superfluous clicks which, in turn, can increase your return on investment and save you money.

Only recently, I was working on a client’s campaign in the heavy duty construction industry.  When digging deeper into the account (no pun intended) I discovered a large list of potential negative keywords.  While it was helpful to add negative keywords along the lines of toys, games and costumes; it was also helpful to add negative keywords related to accidents, injuries and crashes.  It’s just as important to concentrate on the negative keywords as it is to focus of the search keywords.  One helpful tool to utilize when creating your list of negative keywords is the Google keywords tool.  By entering keywords into the search, you can see the volume of searches conducted on your industry or product; you can use all the search volume information and keywords that it produces to decided whether or not these terms are relevant to your business objectives.

So remember, it’s ok to think negatively sometimes…it may save you a lot of money and increase your ROI.