Firstly i want to say i do not want those PPC experts to throw the book at me and preach the importance of negative keywords. Sure for some campaigns they can be crucial however if the correct research is conducted across the market you are looking to launch your campaigns in then surely we can go without keywords.

Google Adwords data centre offer the following example surrounding negative keywords:

II. Example

The negative keyword –free trial would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and trial. It would not prevent your ads from showing on variations of these terms, however. It also would not prevent your ads from showing on search queries that only contain one of the terms.

For instance, the search queries one-day trial and free test could trigger your ads, while free one-day trial could not.

No doubt this explains the importance of negative keywords to the beginning however i tend to stay away from negative keywords and research my campaigns in depth in order to cover all potential keyword avenue’s without the use of negative keywords. Let me explain using an example I previously used in my post on the difference between Broad,phrase and exact match keywords.

I recently worked with clients who offer an ecommerce website for water features. I typically research the niche market the campaign is aimed towards and understand the constrains of the clients budget, the average cost per click on the top performing keywords amongst other techniques.

The introduction of the broad, exact and phrase match keywords has enabled us marketers to almost disregard negative keywords. In my humble opinion a successful paid search marketing campaign will discover all the possibilities of search aligned to a specific market. Granted there is the ability for people to misspell certain words however when you are working within a constraint budget its essential that you are targeting those specific keywords and those keywords only. Under these conditions i tend to adopt both phrase and exact match types ad opposed to broad match with negative keywords. This gives a more specific search criteria.

Researching your target market in detail and making sure you target all possible keywords which are typically searched is for me the most cost effective method available. Again i am not disputing negative keywords are important under some campaigns however typically i tend to adopt the use to tailored keywords on both phrase and exact match. This also helps you indentify what keywords are converting and gives a clearer picture on how your account is performing on a keyword to keyword basis.

Thanks for reading guys. Would love to hear your opinions.

Ryan

The Google keyword tool can be located through the following link attributed to the screenshot. Within the screenshot i have done a search for ‘google adwords keyword tool’ which is the topic of this blog.

I am supplied with the following results.

: The Keyword
: Advertisers competition ( The amount of competition from a search perspective attributed to this keyword)
: Local search volume for the previous month (This is related to the country you have chosen for your local search volume). This can be changed through the following area of the keyword search tool.

Clicking the edit button you can display which local search volume you want. Easy hey?

: Global monthly search volume. If you are catering for the wider audience then this is a key feature you need to look for.

Why Is this tool important?

The data within the Google Adwords keyword tool is brought to you by Google which means the accuracy of the data is as current as it can be. Google wouldn’t provide its customer base with incorrect data as this would surely hinder the development of their Google adwords advertising platform

What to do with this information?

As i stressed earlier please don’t use this tool as the only method for your keyword research. This should be in-depth, related to the niche in question and contain longer tail keywords. The keyword tool does however give you an alternative perspective within your search criteria.

Case Study

A recent project of mine involved a ecommerce website selling ‘water features’. I typically search around the term to provide a basis for my research. Using the keyword tool i would add the most broad term linked to the product and then use further keywords produced to form the basis of my campaign. The keyword tool brought back variations of the products the ecommerce site sells include ‘water fountains, self contained water features’ to name a few. Due to my limited knowledge of Water features this provided basic information for me to detail my further keyword building around. The keyword search tool does the basic jobs of supplying you with keyword examples. Its up to you to find the longer tailed keywords to really find those niche clients

Seeing the bigger picture

There is endless features involved within the Google keyword tool. Once i have searched my selected keyword i typically change settings within the drop down menu provided.

When choosing which columns to display click to show all the columns as shown in the screenshot above. This will provide the following information:

Within these new fields you will be presented with estimated position, estimated average cost per click, when the highest volume of searches occurred and most significantly the search volumes trend by month.  This is extremely important as the overall volume of searches doesn’t highlight when the keyword is my popular.

This was extremely important when producing keywords for ‘Water features’ as the volume of searches were significantly lower in the winter months than in summer months. Sounds obvious really but its amazing the mistakes online marketing individuals make when advertising through paid search especially with a seasonal product like water features.

The same can be applied for many areas of ecommerce paid search advertising. If your company sells suntan cream then using the keyword tool to identify the monthly trends can help make strategic decisions on when to spend the bulk of the yearly advertising budget. This type of knowledge is crucial in order to produce success paid search marketing campaigns.

I hope this is of help to you guys. Please comment away and retweet, digg or stumble upon my post. Very much appreciated.

Thanks

Ryan