Getting the right negative keywords are as important as positive keywords. SiteWit did a study in early this year that showed the top 3 paid result spots get about 41% of the clicks on SERP. Nowadays, to get those top spots are expensive, with wasteful clicks can drain budget for ads so quickly. While, online marketers are still not taking advantage by not using negative keywords, this kind of keyword is very underutilized in adWords and forgotten by many website owners especially from small business.
Many website owners missing out huge advantage from this strategy and of course, Google won’t remind them about it, and the search engine will only tell them that they aren’t reaching out to whole of their audience. This is not entirely true, because marketers just not optimizing their ads wide enough to reach all of their targeted audience. When creating keyword strategy for a campaign, there are 5 different types of settings that need to be filled. Which are broad match, broad modified, phrase match, exact match and negative match. Each of these settings has different roles.
- Use broad match if you want to know the largest reach with least expensive budget. If you using this settings, then your page will eligible to appear every time search queries that a user enter includes any word in your phrase, in any order or synonyms. For instance, using broad match for ‘luxury condo’, then your page may showed up when users search for, ‘condo rentals, ‘expensive homes’, or maybe ‘real estate listings’.
- Use broad modified to reach wide audience, but have tendency to filter who can see your page by only targeting users in a key phrase using ‘+’ parameter. Adding the plus sign in front of a keyword, it’s like telling Google that the search queries must include that term.
- Phrase match usually use by website owners so their keywords will appear when users search queries containing part of their keywords. For instance, a website has ‘black shoes’ as keywords, then their page may showed up when a user searched for ‘high heel black shoes’, ‘cheap black shoes’, or ‘black shoes on sale, but won’t show up for queries like ‘black sneakers’, ‘black boots, or ‘shoes in black color.
- Exact match is only to get traffic from users who search the exact keyword phrase that you targeted to. For instance, if you use ‘black iPhone’ as targeted keyword phrase then only when the exact phrase that users queries made your page show up.
It’s not shocking that most of the website owners are trying to maximize the exposure of their page by using broad match or phrase match. Even though, it’s a great strategy to increase traffic but this strategy can be much more improved by adding negative keywords as well. With negative keyword is to assisting the traffic by filtering out the unwanted searches. To follow above example, the targeted keyword is black shoes. Then, you don’t want your keyword includes in weird/spammy queries. So, you can add the unwanted search queries to negative keyword.
Negative keywords are very important in keyword research because they dodging users who most likely are not going to buy service/product that you’re offering; this will make you save some campaign budget. If a user went to your site by mistake and they return straight away to search page, this will impact your bounce rate. With negative keyword, this kind of mistake could be avoided.
