Negative is Still Positive with Google Adwords, and BING too.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Five years ago I wrote a popular blog article on the use of negative keywords for Adwords, entitled Negative is Positive with Google Adwords.

Guess what? Negativity, in the form of negative search terms, is still a very useful tactic for refining your paid search campaigns, lowering your costs, and improving your conversions.

Both Adwords and BING provide easy-to-use tools to research and add negative terms to your campaigns and individual adword groups. Negative keyword search tactics are often ignored and underutilized, based upon my observations over the years... leading to large amounts of wasted effort and spending.

Negative is Positive with Paid Search

Why use Negative Search Terms?

Negative search terms help filter out people searching for things not relevant to your business.

One of the the challenges with paid search is that very different people may use identical or very similar search terms to access very different information and business solutions. Also called 'indirect search engine competitors', many bad things can happen to your search campaign if you find yourself inadvertently competing against indirect competitors.

For example, if your company sells 'brake shoe liners' to B-to-B industrial and mass transportation clients, your attempts to use paid search ads using search terms such as 'brake shoe' or 'shoe liner' may result in your ads competing against totally unrelated businesses selling 'shoes', 'brakes', 'liners', and variations of these keyword search terms. Not only will you pay more to be higher up in the rankings, but you may get clicks and 'leads' from confused or irrelevant visitors. You'll waste time, money, and harm your reputation as you attract 'garbage leads'.

Besides using more long-tail search terms, adding negative search terms will help cut back on the clutter and waste. If a potential searcher is looking for a search term which includes your negative keyword, your ad will not show. You just saved time, money, and reputation. Negative search terms to combat 'brake shoe liners' could include 'store', 'women's', 'sale', 'car', 'autoparts', etc. Your click through rate will climb, your quality score will climb, your conversion rate will climb, and more.

A well designed paid search campaign may, in fact, have more negative search terms than positive.

Google Adwords in particular has some great tools you can use to research both potential and actual search terms related to your keywords and your ads. You can actually review real Adwords search history for your adwords groups, select search terms which are not desirable, add and/or modify them to ensure there is no unintended problem with your positive search terms, and then load them as negative terms. You've just enhanced the performance of your campaigns.

One important word of advice regarding negative search terms... choose wisely, selectively, and sparingly. Try to keep to one-word negative keyword lists, as this will reduce the risk of accidentally filtering for good keywords. Better to use 'automobile' as negative term than 'automobile research', if your company conducts research for clients, for example.

Lessons Learned from Ten Years with Google Adwords

Aggressive Link Building for B2B SEO is a Fool's Game

Artificial link-building for short-term B2B SEO advantage is a mirage and an affliction. 
Don't do it. 

You don't need to engage in artificial and risky attempts to build links to boost your webpage's B2B SEO success.

My SEO philosophy is to build quality content, target and exploite long-tail-search opportunities, and network those pages into cohesive and related clusters of relevant content. Then let the search engines rank these pages, ideally getting to page one results. When done correctly, this will encourage the proactive creation of quality, natural, inbound links from other websites which find my material relevant and worthy.

Inbound links are valuable if they are organic, have natural fit, are mostly unsolicited, and come from quality sources. Call this the 'white hat' laissez faire school of 'let them come' link SEO.

Buying links, joining link networks and participating in link-farms are blatant attempts to unnaturally and artificially circumvent search engine organic ranking systems. Search Engines hate these 'black hat' tactics because they can pollute organic search results with spammy pages of poor quality, pushing more deserving webpages down in rankings. Such tactics can create manipulated results which strike at the core consumer value of Google and BING. That's why Matt Cutts and Google have declared war on unnatural link-builders attempting to "game" SERP results.

I've witnessed various in-house marketers and agencies proclaim that acquiring links was their primary tactic. It didn't seem to matter that their webpages content was ageing, verbose, too broad, and too long. Nor did it matter that their webpage organization and hierarchy was poor. Never mind that their webpages violated the principles of long-tail-search and the content was not concise, not precise, nor relevant. None of that mattered. Chasing links would do the heavy lifting for SEO success, wouldn't it? No, not really. Especially not if you are in for the long-haul.

Play to Win, without buying Links.

In my 12+ years of search engine marketing and lead generation success, I've never engaged in a systematic attempt to increase the number of inbound links to my websites. Not once. I'm too busy optimizing niche content, focusing on long-tail-search, and enhancing website structure and hierarchy. In other words, I am focused on providing a superior, quality, product for humans (my potential customers) and search engines.

During a recent presentation I gave on Search Engine Marketing, during Q&A someone asked why I had not brought up link-building. When I told them that my success has come without link-building projects, there was an audible gasp from several people in the audience. I was apparently committing a form of SEO Linking blasphemy, in their link-loving minds at least.

Link-building hurts the innocent, too. I've met a some poor souls recently whose company websites were hit hard by recent Google updates and actions. Their pages dropped out of vital page one search results. Their company websites, built invariably by some hired, local SEO agency and/or 'seo expert', were set-up for disaster because a major part of the SEO strategy was to buy links. Once Google's anti-spam filters caught up with these sites, they were severely punished. Now these companies are scrambling to rebuild their sites, disavow links, and petition Google to give them another chance.

Matt Cutts video on "Unnatural Links to Site":



Creating a B2B search engine optimization programs based on aggressive link-building is fraught with danger, risk, and ultimate failure. "Black Hat" link-building may look like a short-cut to SEO success, but in the end such link-building tactics can, and will, backfire.

Focus on precise content, relevant content, webpage organization, and long-tail-search instead. You'll be amply rewarded.

Feed Your Website. Feed IT.

10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates

10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today - A webinar presentation from WordStream and Hanapin Marketing.

If you directly manage or supervise Paid Search Campaigns, like Google Adwords or Microsoft BING, this presentation on click through rates (CTR) is highly suggested.

We benefit from higher click through rates with more efficient campaigns, lower cost per acquisition (CPA) and higher conversion rates, if thoughtful targeting, organization & structure, keyword selection, negative search terms, and other campaign settings are used to better weed out non-relevant (wasted) clicks and spending.

Presented by Larry Kim (Founder, CTO of Wordstream), Sean Quadlin (Writer and account manager at PPC Hero & Hanapin Marketing), this presentation on "10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today" is well worth watching and learning. You'll be inspired to improve the PPC CTRs for your own campaigns.

 

10 Ways to Increase Your PPC Click-Through Rates Today [WordStream and Hanapin Marketing Webinar] from Internet Marketing Software - WordStream

Learning to Live With The BOMB: Google Search

Questions about Google's Search Engine, Algorithm, Competition:

Another great question on LinkedIn prompted me to offer some search engine marketing thoughts on the dominance of Google and having to learn to "Live With The Bomb".... Google's Search Engine Algorithm.

Lead generation lives and dies by Google's Search relevancy rankings and evolving algorithms. Google Search criteria are always evolving. We depend upon high rankings to pull in quality B2B leads via Google organic search. In short, the Algorithm can make things very lucrative for us or very frustrating.

A few Google inspired thoughts:

1. Google owns search related patents, but the algorithm is a strategic, dynamic and proprietary tool... while patents offer protection they are public and eventually expire, competition can see your secrets and work to duplicate them once the patent is expired, or worse, create a 'work-around' of the patent and release a competitive product even sooner. This needs to be confirmed, but I suspect Google would not want to patent any version of the search algorithm for public viewing, a situation similar to Coca-Cola keeping the original formula for Coke locked up in a safe, and never patenting the formula.

2. I find Google's search results much better as a general rule, more relevant. They filter better, they handle 'similar results' better, they index more webpages, and they hire very intelligent people to work on making the site ever more relevant for the search engine user. This is one reason why technical and business professionals overwhelming use Google, as high as 80% usage. I often get strange or odd results using BING, Yahoo and all those little engines out there trying to survive or be the next Google.

3. Google is dominant because they had first-mover advantage and produced a great product early on. Everybody else has been playing catch-up ever since. Having praised Google, I have to say near-monopolies make me a bit nervous. I depend upon Google for business, I use it for my personal use search almost exclusively, I use Gmail, Chrome and other exanding bits of the Google empire. I even visited GooglePlex in Mountain View, California (Awsome). I really like Google.... but Google needs a worthy competitor to keep them on their toes and give us customers optimal choices in the market. Perhaps BING or a revived Yahoo can play that role in the future.