Make a Website Great

In case you’re unfamiliar with negative keywords, I’ll briefly explain those right now. When using negative keywords, you tell the PPC (pay-per-click) ad system not to display your ads if a search phrase contains the words specified. This is obviously only applicable to non-exact matches. For example, suppose you advertise on the broad phrase home mortgage, then your ads will come up whenever someone searches with a phrase that contains the words home and mortgage. But what happens if someone searches on “home mortgage crisis”? Ah, this phrase is not very useful for selling anything. Someone is probably looking for research material, and you don’t want any of the curiosity clicks that may result if your ad shows up under that phrase. So then a negative word for your ad campaign would be crisis.

In addition to eliminating unwanted clicks, negative keywords will help your ad avoid showing up when the search is irrelevant (such as an ad for a home mortgage loan showing up when someone searches for mortgage crisis information) and thereby boost your click-through rate. And as you may know, PPC search engines award high click-trhough ads with lower per-click fees.

And now to the meat of this article.

How to Find Negative Keywords

The first thing you need to do is go to your favorite keyword research tool, come up with a huge keyword list that’s relevant to your ad down to the least frequently searched, and save it as text.

Next, you’ll use a tool to separate and count the number of occurrences of each individual word in that keyword list. The free Web based Word Count tool from AddMe.com will do the job nicely. This tool was not intended to be used for PPC marketing (at least it doesn’t seem this way), but it does exactly the job we need here.

Now, copy and paste your keyword list into the text area of Word Count, and click the Go button. What Word Count will do is come up with a table showing the number of times each keyword appears in your list. Something like the following:

And now all you need to do is go down this list, and pick out all the words that are blatantly irrelevant to your advertising campaign and add them to your negative keywords list. Any PPC search engine worth its while will have a negative keyword capability, letting you add negative keywords to your ad campaign and eliminating ad displays accordingly. The higher the count of a negative keyword, the more important it is to your list, but you’d probably want to get all the irrelevant keywords down to the bottom of the table.