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

Adding a Single Keyword Turns a Webpage from Invisible to Dominant

Crafting a B-to-B webpage which controls the top organic websearch results in Google and other search engines takes time, thought and effort. The stakes are high. If your webpage does not show up on page one for organic search results, your page essentially does not exist to search engine users.

Sometimes a very simple head-slapping fix can turn a poorly ranking webpage into a world champion organic search-engine lead machine, beating the competition by ranking at or near the top.

A recurring example involves location-targeted webpages. The 'local' or 'regional' webpages were not ranking for key location-specific search terms the stakeholders want. When I reviewed the problem pages, it was apparent that actual name of that targeted location was not on the pages... not in the headlines, not in the text, not anywhere. So how could a search engine make the connection? It couldn't. By simply adding the place name to the pages in key spots, the problem was solved and the previously "invisible" webpages transformed into page one ranking pages on Google for organic search.

There are times when an easy common sense fix will solve a major SEO problem. It is easy to overlook a content issue or enhancement, no one is perfect. This is why having others look at our work is so important...

 Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be). 

Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

I am called many things, but being negative is usually not one of them. However, when it comes to managing Google Adwords campaigns, I am proud to wallow in negativity!

Using "Negative Keywords" can greatly filter out and reduce wasted clicks on your Adword campaigns, lessen the chance of confused (irrelevant) visitors and help your overall campaign costs, conversion rates and cost-per-conversion. They also help reduce the load on enquiry centers handling the enquiries. I am a big fan of the aggressive use of intelligently selected negative keywords.

Adding negative keywords and search terms is rather easy... you can add them manually and/or, (strongly advised) research the term first with the Google Keyword Tool. You'll be amazed at the sheer number of similar search terms entered by people which have no relevance or value to your B2B campaigns.

An example of a negative term is one related to a desired search term, for example, 'Chemical Lab'. I want people who need professional B2B chemical analysis services. I don't want people looking for a 'Lab' as in 'Labrador Retreiver', or a 'Lab' puppy. So -dog, -dogs, -puppy, -puppies, etc, all go negative for this campaign. This is a simple task with the Keyword tool. For us, other great related negative terms include '-job', '-jobs', '-drug lab' etc. Filter the worthless search terms as much as you can.

I have quite a few campaigns where my negative terms outnumber my positive search terms... and these campaigns greatly benefit from this strong filtering. Conversion rates jump, costs slump. Very positive results from going negative.

Caution: Negative Search Terms and Names can have a very powerful filtering impact, and if you are not careful, unintended consequences can hurt your campaign. For example, if I had used 'lab puppy' as a broad negative search term, I could be filtering out other desirable 'lab' related searches. Going negative for [lab puppy] is better. Using only 'puppy', a very specific one word negative search term, is the least risky of all. I try to keep my negative search terms to one word each. Keep this possibility in mind when adding negative phrases or word combinations.

I use negative keyword terms in B2B campaigns across global business streams, niches, regions and languages, a 24/7 operation. Going negative helped reduce my spend on poor quality clicks and sparked higher conversion rates. If you're not using negative search terms yet, you're likely wasting money and time, which is never a good situation.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.