I spent most of the day today building out a PPC campaign for a new client in a very specialized B2B market. His big challenge is that while he only services commercial clients, many of the search terms overlap individuals who are too small for him to service. So, I set out to build him the greatest negative keyword list possible.
During my journey, I chanced upon two great tools for negative keyword selection, both are now bookmarked, and I recommend you do the same.
If You Don’t Want To Be The Latest Victim To Suffer Death Through A Thousand Clicks, You Need To Sharpen Your Negative Keyword Strategy As Much As Possible.
The first resource is an incredible list of over 2oo keywords that a B2B marketer should avoid like the plague.
This list breaks it down by category. For example, if you are a plumber, you probably don’t want clicks from people looking for a trade school with a course on becoming a plumber, so the list has a bunch of variations of education based keywords to negative out of your campaigns. (school, course, class,etc…)
Some other types of searchers you might want to avoid are job seekers, reference seekers (i.e. what is plumbing), researchers (stats, associations, etc…), DIY searchers, legal searches (compliance, regulations, etc…)
While every client and case will be different, the list in the link above is quite a handy resource…
The Killer Negative Keyword Tool I Found Though Is Something That Wordstream Put Together… Called… Drumroll please… Negative Keyword Tool …
As I am sure you know, the best strategy out there is to sit down with your client and go through keyword lists, and his matched search query report in analytics to see which long tail words are irrelevant.
Essentially, this tool gives you a bunch of long tail keywords in your industry, and asks you if they are relevant or not. As you answer, it finds the long tails that you said are not relevant, and builds you a big list of negative keywords. This tool works like a charm.
If only someone built such a tool to mine your analytics matched search query report in the same format. Heck, I could create a fun interactive quiz for my clients to play, and use the end result to deliver killer results.
Enjoy, and if you know of such a tool to mine analytics, or to upload your own keyword list, please let me know.
A special treat for those who are interested, here is a great big list of keywords that should be negative in almost any account… (i.e. craigslist, justin bieber, etc…)
https://www.engineready.com/sem-resources/sem-newsletter/negative-keywords.txt
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Thank you for the link to the page about 200 words to avoid. I can imagine that being quite helpful in the future and it’s kind of cemented the idea of thinking about the words you’re using because even thought some may relate, it’s true that they might always been the best for targeting the exact people that you want. Your second resource, the keyword tool is going to be invaluable. They’re both great so thanks for including them in a post.
I have just been looking over the 200+ word list and you have no idea how ridiculous I felt the second I opened up the page and saw all the words to avoid because they would bring in job seekers. I don’t do PPC yet but I feel like if I hadn’t found this post/list, some of them would definitely have ended up where they shouldn’t have and been bringing in the wrong type of audience. I feel like this is going to be very useful in the future.
Hello David,
It was good to read about these tools and I think I can show something new for you which analyze your matched search queries and try to determine potential negative keywords.
You could reach tool on http://www.negativekeywordtool.com, currently I am at beta stage, so I am working on to fine tune the algorithm.
It’s a free and simple tool, when you have a chance, please test it and send me your feedback!
Thank you!
Krisztian