How to Identify Negative Keywords

How to Identify Negative Keywords

One of the best ways you can start identifying negative keywords is – you guessed it – by examining actual user data based on how people search. This can be done through the AdWords Keyword Planner and Search Terms Report.

Keyword Planner

The AdWords Keyword Planner is intended to help you find keywords to bid on, not to exclude. (Google doesn’t really mind if you spend a few extra dollars on clicks you don’t need.) But you can also use it to find negative keyword ideas for your list. When you search for a term like “calendars,” you’ll see a list of related keyword searches along with some data on their search volume and competition.

If you see terms in the list that you know don’t apply to your business (like “free” and “printable” here), consider adding them to your negative keyword list.

Search Terms Report

The Search Terms Report shows you the actual search queries that people typed into Google to trigger your AdWords ads. Once you have a firm grasp on the types of search queries that triggered your ad, you can begin to put together lists of both positive and negative keywords. This method can yield some solid results.

For example, you can sort results of the Search Terms Report by the highest number of impressions, which provides you with a list of the most popular search queries that trigger your ads. This data can then be further refined to show which terms have higher click-through and conversion rates. Even terms you assumed may work in your favor might not be performing as well as you thought they would. If this is the case, you should consider adding them to your list of negative keywords – even if they might appear to be closely related to your business or product.

Some people are happy enough to make this the first and only stage of their negative keyword strategy, but not you. Like Sylvester Stallone sprinting up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in “Rocky,” only the best is good enough for you. But what else can you do?

Get Creative with Your Negative Keyword List

It pays to be creative when creating lists of negative keywords. This concept strikes fear into the hearts of some people (is it wearing overalls?), but if you’re tempted to skip this step, just picture that cabin in Tahoe. See? Infinitely more motivational than a poster of a mountain range coupled with a generic slogan about overcoming obstacles.

Let’s go back to our calendar example. You might think you’ve saved yourself thousands of dollars in PPC spend by including “Mayan calendar” as a negative keyword – and maybe you have – but there are many more opportunities to eliminate wasted clicks. For instance, a user searching for “calendar girls” may be looking for information about:

• The 2003 feel-good British movie of the same name starring Dame Helen Mirren.
• The lesser-known 1993 comedy drama Calendar Girl featuring throwback teen heartthrob Jason Priestly.
• The 1961 Neil Sedaka song.
• Something entirely more risqué.

Regardless of their intent, they’re probably not interested in calendars of kittens wearing argyle sweaters posed against dramatic panoramas of Cork – and if you don’t include “calendar girls” as a negative keyword, they could be costing you money.

Do Your Homework: Competitive Research for Negative Keywords

Performing a Google search of your primary keywords is another excellent launch point for unearthing even more negative keywords. Anything that shows up on the first couple of pages is information that Google deems relevant to the search. So if you see stuff that isn’t transactional, add those terms to your list.

Using a Negative Keyword Tool

Our free Negative Keyword tool is another invaluable resource when creating negative keyword lists. Simply enter a keyword associated with your business, and then gasp in delight and/or shock at the results. This tool searches our database of more than 1 trillion keywords to create extensive lists of search terms that may or may not be related to your business, helping you further refine your negative keyword list. The tool returns results in clusters, rather than isolated incidences of negative terms like the Search Terms Report, and you can review and upload these changes directly to your AdWords account, saving you (or your poor intern) time and effort.

Other tools can help you expand your steadily growing list of negative keywords, too. Soovle, for example, gives you a brief overview of common search terms across a range of sites that aren’t likely to be helpful to your PPC campaign, such as YouTube, Netflix and Wikipedia.

How to Add Negative Keywords to Your AdWords Account

By now you should have a robust list of negative keywords, but to start saving money on clicks, you need to actually add them to your account (duh). Too see how, watch this quick tutorial video from AdWords:

Accept the Truth About Negative Keywords

So, we’ve established that having a negative keyword strategy is officially a Big Deal™, and that you should put time and effort into compiling your list of negative search terms. However, maybe you’re sitting there thinking, “I already know all this, Dan. My negative keyword strategy is airtight.” Some of the entrants who participated in our recent Grade and Get Paid competition certainly thought so. However, for many of the businesses that entered, the experience was an eye-opener, to say the least. (Check out our case study with the big winner here.)

At the outset of the contest, entrants were asked to run our AdWords Performance Grader on their PPC campaigns. After 30 days, they ran it again to see how the results measured up. Overall, advertisers added 29% more text ads, 109% more Ad Groups and 663% more keywords based on the results of the initial assessment – but that’s not the most exciting part. In the 30 days after getting their first report, entrants added 103,410 more negative keywords, averaging around 186 additional negative search terms per account.

Pretty awesome, right? Think of all the money saved! You too could be taking back thousands of dollars a year from Google, so start working on your negative keyword list.

About the Author

Dan Shewan is a Web Content Specialist at WordStream. Originally from the U.K., Dan now resides in Boston, MA. After graduating with a degree in broadcast journalism in 2004, Dan worked in the television production and publishing industries in London before taking his first tentative steps into the murky waters of SEO in 2007.

In addition to his keen interest in SEO and content strategy, Dan is passionate about information freedom, digital privacy, open-source software, growth hacking, robotics, artificial intelligence and many other equally nerdy topics. When he’s not writing web content, Dan dabbles in writing code, and is interested in emerging web technologies and how they can make people’s lives better.

Although careful to avoid stereotypes, Dan enjoys single-malt Scotch and long, brooding walks. You can follow him on Twitter (@danshewan) and Google+.

Keyword List Building

Keyword List Building 101

After doing all of your research, you now have a pretty good crop of data to sift through. Remember, during the Research Phase, we collected every keyword we found during our various investigations. Check out this article for a comprehensive recap of Research Phase posts from this column regarding PPC research.

Some of sources used for the initial keyword research were:

• The kickoff meeting with the client
• A preliminary search of the major engines
• Previous (or current) paid search campaigns
• The advertiser’s site(s) and competitor sites
• The advertiser’s site level web analytics systems
• Engine and third party keyword suggestion tools
• Keyword monitoring tools
• SEO software
• Competitive intelligence platforms
• Industry research sites
• Social media research tools

That’s a lot of sources! By now, you should really have enough keywords to put together a very comprehensive list. There’s no need to start segmenting the terms into ad groups/campaigns yet. However, if some natural groups begin to appear, go ahead and keep track of some of the obvious sets and we’ll consider using them later.

Here are some important things to keep in mind when building up your keyword list.

There’s no such thing as too many terms. Here’s the rule: if you even question that a term could be in your account, then it should be there. You’ll quickly know when there are obvious words that need to be thrown out. Just remember, every keyword in your account will ultimately have to prove itself to become an active term. So, at this stage in the game, keep any term you uncover that has a potential to reach your target audience—you can always pause or outright delete any word later.

Do your own market research. This is about the best tip I can share with those new to paid search. The entire goal of having a keyword list it to connect real people with your advertiser’s search ads. So isn’t it silly not to ask some real people how they might search for a particular topic? You’d be surprised how many interesting terms you pick up when you simply start asking folks their opinions for keywords. Ask your mom, your neighbors, your colleagues… believe me, this will be a very educating experience for you. You might even want to sit down at the computer with these people and literally watch over their shoulder to see how they’re searching. One good trick is to ask people to find a certain product page online. It’s very interesting to see how different people try to find stuff based on their understanding of search. Some use long phrases, others start with very broad terms and keep narrowing their choices.

Use keyword suggestion tools again. Now that you have more terms from your research, go back to the keyword suggestion tools such as Google’s and WordTracker’s and see what other keywords they suggest. This is especially helpful when you have a very broad term (i.e. insurance, computer, car, etc.) as the tools can spit out huge lists of tail terms. When you do use these tools, go ahead and grab any meta data on the term you find as it can be helpful to you later. For example, Google’s tool returns valuable information surrounding keywords such as an estimated cost to be on the first page of results, historical search data for the keyword and so on.

Use other tools too. Thesaurus.com is a great, free way to find multiple variations of the same word. For example, a quick search of synonyms for movie include film, flick, motion picture, feature, picture, show, etc. Also, try news sites or even Wikipedia. Doing standard web research on a topic will uncover new terms or at least new directions to think about. Here’s a cool tool: Soovle. You know when you start typing into a search box and start getting auto-suggestions in a drop down menu underneath? Well, Soovle is an engine that returns the top auto-suggestions from sites like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and more.

Find jargon and slang. It’s very easy to miss some of the more common jargon or slang from a particular industry, especially if it’s a very narrowly focused topic (bear feeders). But, it’s our job as search engine marketers to become virtual experts on our advertiser’s business and niche. Talk to any veteran search marketer and you will find a Jack (or Jill) of all trades with advanced knowledge into many different business categories and verticals. Years ago, one of my clients was an industrial lighting retailer. To this day, if we were to walk into any doctor’s office in the country, I could tell you the make and model of just about any fluorescent light fixture that might be installed. Believe me, that’s not something I intended to know that much about. But, as search marketers, words are the tools of our trade and it’s important to delve deep with every client to find the right words their customers might use to reach them.

Don’t forget misspellings or plurals. This was hammered home to me a few years ago with one of my international clients that had a company name in a foreign language. Wouldn’t you know it—the best performing campaign in the entire account was the one with literally over two hundred different misspelled versions of their company name! You should know that some engines, misspellings and plurals are treated as completely different terms. Just think of the difference in intent of the terms hotel room and hotel rooms. It’s a slight distinction, but a travel site may treat users who are looking for a single room differently than someone looking for multiple hotel rooms.

Check the advertiser’s site again. Do a double check to make sure you’re including all of the language the advertiser is already using on their site. Certain buzz words may be indicative of their unique selling point or how they position themselves in the marketplace. I can’t tell you how many times a major term has been left out of a keyword list even if it’s listed on almost every page of their site. It’s almost as if it seemed so obvious that no one thought to check for it.

Include brand and product names. A no-brainer in SEM is to include any and all of your brand names and product terms into your keyword list. It’s safe to assume that searchers, as a whole, who query SKU numbers, product IDs, etc. are already well into the buying cycle of your advertiser’s products or services. Grab the low hanging fruit by including these terms into your campaign. Some retailers, even large ones, literally use a feed from their ecommerce site to continuously upload new product names and codes to their PPC accounts.

Don’t dismiss terms because you think they might be too expensive or didn’t work before. This is an easy one to let slip by. Clients who don’t run search accounts may advise you to not use certain terms that are literally screaming out to you to be used. Ultimately, the client is paying the bill and you might have to go against your intuition and not use those keywords. However, make sure you understand the issue behind the decision. The keyword landscapes of any industry are always changing. Terms that didn’t work last year may work today just as ones working today may not be effective next month. Plus, maybe the term never performed because of poor ad copy, or the ads it was paired with resolved to a bad landing page. There are too many variables in play to dismiss a term without the proper (recent) data to help you decide.

Use competitor terms (you can still use them in Google). Although Bing and Yahoo have categorically disapproved any keyword lists or ads that contain competitor trademarked terms, Google still allows you to bid on them, even if you can’t use them in the ad text. So take advantage of this now as the window might close on this anytime. Certainly, if you’re a direct competitor of a large corporation, you can use their large offline awareness campaigns to help drive interest to your topic—and capitalize on this by buying their brand and product keywords. This can be especially beneficial when the competitor’s name is virtually the term that consumers use to describe a category. For example, Kleenex is a common term for any tissue paper. Tivo is certainly used interchangeably with the generic term, DVR. These terms are pretty much vital for any other competitors in the same space.

Next week, we’ll perform magic and I’ll show you how to instantly turn a keyword list with hundreds of terms into thousands, and thousands of terms into millions.

Bing Ads Puts Estimated Keyword Bid Suggestions

Bing Ads Puts Estimated Keyword Bid Suggestions In Columns, Adds Keyword Delivery Status Alerts

Bing Ads launched a couple of relatively small but helpful features today. Both bring keyword status and bid insights into closer parity with Google AdWords.

To get a better understanding of where keyword bids stand in relation to the competition, Bing Ads has added estimated bid suggestions for first page bid, mainline bid and best position bid in the web user interface.

This data was available before, but in a more cumbersome format. With the addition of estimated bid suggestions along with the bid landscape tool, Bing Ads has retired the old Estimation workflow — the dropdown from the keywords tab that provided selections for traffic, best position, mainline and first page estimations (click to enlarge the image):

To see the bid estimate suggestions, select the Columns icon in the upper right of the toolbar from the Keywords tab and add them to the list of columns.

Low Quality Score, Low Search Volume Keywords

Also launched today are two new delivery status alerts: low search volume and low quality score. Before this change, keywords that met these criteria simply showed as “Eligible” but had zero impressions or clicks associated with them. Now, you’ll have better insight into why the volumes are low or non-existent.

top 50 keywords from google search

TOP 50 Trendy KEYWORD LIST are FOLLOWING

                                     TOP 50 KEYWORD LIST FROM LAST 4 MONTHS

Top list	Keyword Phrase
1	facebook
2	youtube
3	download
4	movies
5	google
6	streaming
7	hotmail
8	facebook login
9	internet
10	yahoo
11	madasfish
12	ebay
13	antivirus software
14	yahoo mail
15	craigslist
16	aot
17	paid to promote
18	dvd movies online
19	gmail
20	games
21	fb
22	internetreal
23	shopping
24	proxy dozer
25	amazon
26	jobs
27	video
28	promote
29	new
30	twitter
31	paid to
32	minecraft
33	free
34	earn cpcs
35	earn chi
36	netflix
37	videos
38	net
39	pulse
40	posted by
41	date you
42	news
43	this date
44	msn
45	facebook yahoo
46	birthday gifts
47	cars
48	best100tattoos
49	walmart
50	software

LIST UPDATE FREQUENTLY ...!

what are keywords how to use it

What is keyword ?

When somebody utilizes a search engines, they write in one or more words depicting what they are searching for " iphone " or " samsung ", for example. These words or expressions are known as catchphrases.In online Business the key of is Choosing Best Keyword , Using Best keyword And content.

  

What is the use's of Keyword ?

Do you know what keywords your website is currently ranking for online? Keywords are very important for every business website as they drive targeted web traffic to your business for free. When done well, using the right keywords can skyrocket your business to sales success online. 

Using keywords correctly throughout a page and a website can be critical when you are trying to improve search engine ranking as part of your Internet marketing strategy. The first and most obvious use of keywords during the organic search engine optimization (SEO) process .

Therefore, it is very important to make sure that keywords are used appropriately near the top of the page and proportionally throughout the page. The Keyword Density Analyzer within the SEOToolset is an excellent SEO tool to help in visualizing the distribution of keywords throughout the page.

 It is also important to consider the use of keywords in headings and anchor text (link text) when you are trying to improve search engine ranking. Using SEO keywords appropriately within headings gives emphasis to the importance of those particular keywords to the theme of the page. Headings should be used as short descriptions (1-5 words) of the subject matter that follows, similarly to the way roman numerals are used in an outline. Incorporating keywords into these heading tags gives priority to these keywords in terms of their relevance. 
The same can be said for the use of keywords within anchor text. Having keywords within anchor text implies that there is a link to another area on your site or externally that provides even more information related to these keywords, serving to enhance the idea this keyword is important to the theme of the site.
 In addition to making sure that keywords are distributed well throughout the visible page content, they may also be incorporated into image alt attributes to reinforce the theme of the page. It is important that keywords used within alt text are truly relevant to the image and are kept to a length appropriate to the size of the image. In the SEO process of incorporating keywords into a page and a site, it is extremely important to remember that keywords can be overused and become detrimental to search engine ranking. Keyword stuffing in Meta Tags, headings, anchor text, alt attributes, or within the page content is an indicator of spam techniques.

how to use it !

Best Places to Use Keyword's in Your Blog Or Website

* Post Title 
* Post Description
* In Meta Tags
* In Meta Description
* Image Alt Tags
* Image Caption 
* Domain Name And Tags , Lables

 Bonus Tips : Do Keyword Research and choose best keyword.