Negative keywords are a critical part of all successful Adwords campaigns. Unfortunately, knowing how to use them can be a little tricky at first
In this video we cover a couple examples of negative keywords and how to properly implement them for a better Adwords ROI and higher CTR.
Transcript- What are Negative Keywords?
Hey, it’s Grayson from LeadCadence.com, and welcome to another episode of Frequently Asked Questions Friday. In this week’s episode we’re going to be answering the question: What are negative keywords?
Negative keywords are a list of keywords inside your Google AdWords account that explicitly tell Google to not show your ad if somebody types any of these words into the search box. I’ll give you a couple of examples that will hopefully make this a little easier to understand.
My family business where I grew up working is a street sweeping company. Somebody that’s searching for that service may go to Google and type in “sweeping Orange County” because our business is in Orange County.
If somebody’s searching for sweeping Orange County there’s a good chance that they are looking for what we offer. However, if somebody goes to Google and types in “chimney sweeping Orange County,” chimney sweeping is completely different than street sweeping, so the word chimney would be a negative keyword for us.
We would be telling Google that if somebody types in the word chimney into Google along with any string of keywords, that we don’t want our ad to show up.
Because we know that if somebody’s searching for chimney sweeping that it’s not a service that we can provide them, and if our ad shows up there’s a chance that they may still click on it and cost us money, and they’re never going to turn into a customer because we just don’t offer ever service.
Chimney would be the negative keyword in our account, or at least one of them.
Another example kind of along those same lines is, like I said, we are in Orange County. I happen to also know that there is an Orange County, Florida, and we are in California. Somebody may be searching for sweeping Orange County. However, they may add in the word Florida or FL, the abbreviation for Florida at the end of the search, so “sweeping Orange County Florida.”
Google’s going to try its best to match the person’s search criteria to the best ad. Because there’s an Orange County in both they’re going to struggle to say somebody’s searching for sweeping Orange County. This is one’s pretty close. Let’s show it anyway.
If somebody’s searching for sweeping in Orange County, Florida we don’t have a business there so somebody’s going to click on our ad, they’re going to come to our website, and we’re not going to be able to service them, so again, we don’t get a customer, it costs us money, and they don’t get help.
For us, another negative keyword would be the word Florida or FL. That would explicitly tell Google that if somebody types in Florida or FL, that we don’t want our ad to show up to that searcher.
What this does is it helps cut down on the number of errors that searchers make because they can’t match up exactly the ad correctly, and it also helps lower our budget because people aren’t clicking on stuff that we’re never going to be able to satisfy. It makes our click-through rates go up, which is a great signal to the Google AdWords algorithm that we’re providing a good service to the people that are searching, so that also lowers our cost per click.
We’re not having all these people clicking on it that we can’t help so it’s going to lower our budget and our ad spend.
Those are negative keywords. I know they’re a little bit complicated. If you still have questions, put them in the comments below. I’ll do my best to answer them and see if I can come up with a couple more examples for you. That’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by Frequently Asked Questions Friday.
Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week.
In this video we discuss why you still want to do Google Adwords even if your site is ranking organically in the search engines.
Transcript
Hey, what’s up guys? It’s Grayson from LeadCadence.com. I want to welcome you to another episode of FAQ Friday, where we do our very best to answer your frequently asked questions. Today’s question is, if my website ranks in the organic search results, why would I want to pay to be in the Google Adwords section as well?
There’s actually 4 reasons for that.
The first one is, it gives you twice as much real estate on the page. If you’re already showing up organically, showing up in the Google Adwords section will give you twice the exposure, twice the likelihood that somebody is going to click on your ad or on your company.
Reason #2, it’s a defensive play. There’s only a limited number of spaces on the first page of Google. Some of those are dedicated to the organic search results and some of them are dedicated to Google Adwords. If you’re not in those positions, that gives extra space for your competitors to be in those positions. By making sure your ads show up, or your company shows up in both sections, it decreases that likelihood that your competitors can show up in those sections as well.
#3, there’s really no downside. The reason it’s called Google Adwords is, it’s a form of pay perspective click advertising, which mean you only pay if somebody click on the ad. Having your ad display doesn’t cost you a dime. But if somebody clicks on it, that’s when they go to your website and you get charged. If somebody does click on the ad, it’s a really good thing that you were there because if you weren’t in that position, they would have been clicking on one of your competitors’ ads and ended up on their website.
The last and final reason which gets a little technical, is that we can use the keyword data from inside your Google Adwords account to drive your SEO efforts. What does that mean? Google has really cracked down on the amount of information that they are telling advertisers about the searches that people are doing on the web. They’re not telling if somebody comes to your website organically. They’re not giving all the information about what keywords are those searcher’s using. If you look inside your Google analytics account, it’ll say, “not set”, which means we’re not going to tell you what keywords those people were typing in. However, we can still get that information inside of Google Adwords. We’re paying for that traffic. Google is still going to give us that information. We can use that information to drive your SEO efforts and hopefully rank better in the organic results and in the Google Adwords section.
That’s it for Frequently Asked Questions Friday. Like, Share, Comment on this video. We’ll see you next week.