Know your Negative Keywords

Keywords you should not be using in your content

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered as a vital part of marketing used today in the world. Businesses make the biggest investments to make their brand SEO friendly across search engines.

Despite efforts marketers make in social media and other platforms, SEO has a unique ‘power’ to reach the right audience.

Just as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plays a vital role, precisely when it comes to promoting your product/ services through advertisements.

When you create a sound SEO plan to promote your content, you just need to worry about the negative keywords you have for the product or service you promote — maybe worry lesser than the required keywords, but obviously to a certain extent you should.

When you promote your content on search engines for certain keywords, which we primarily refer as “keyword optimization”, slight variations do apply. Obviously, the plurals and tenses if applicable include in the variations.

So, where it precisely gets tricky is with the point in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is what is commonly referred with, ‘Keyword match types’. This is explained further to the end of the article.

But,

In simple terms, it is a keyword you do not want your ads to be appear. So, when a user searches for the exact keyword, the advertisement placed in the search engine is not displayed.

For an example, you could be the owner of a local restaurant that is based on different locations in Colombo and serves only seafood-based cuisines to diners. Few keywords you should use for paid adverts should be ‘Seafood restaurants in Colombo’ or ‘Family restaurants in Colombo’, but surely not ‘Vegan restaurants in Colombo’ or ‘Vegan family restaurants in Colombo’. The buck spent on the latter is a waste of resources. Hence, you can mark the second set of keywords and phrases I have described as negative keywords.

Keep it simple, mark the keywords and phrases you do not want your ads to be popped up for. This way, you can utilize the most out of your pennies spent on search engine adverts.

The culprit behind the reason for search engines to have negative keywords are the keyword matches that happen inside the search engine itself.

Taking the above example into consideration,

Owner of the seafood-based restaurant has the paid advertisement campaign running for, let’s say, ‘Seafood restaurants in Colombo’ and ‘Family restaurants in Colombo’, but search engines execute few other processes behind the scenes.

They look for,

The concept behind is what is called as “Keyword Matching”.

But, your SEM plan does not need adverts to pop-up for the above searches. So, why do you actually want to pay that extra buck for something you don’t want to be marketed for?

It is to avoid this great blunter Negative Keywords play a hefty role.

Just as much as you want to focus on the keywords you want to be used in your ad campaign in Search Engine Marketing, focus on keywords you do not want your content to be promoted too.

Do the research well ahead and shoot at the stars!

I am an Associate Business Analyst keeping baby-steps to pursue a career as a writer, all the while learning the basics and advanced techniques in writing — one day to achieve my dream.

My medium handle is Muad Arshad where you can find out articles I have written on random topics, life experiences and tech-based roles! — whoops

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