We spend a lot of time talking about keywords and how important they are, but with a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign it is equally important to spend time and effort looking at negative keywords.  This can help you to target only those people that are really interested in your products and services and help you avoid paying for clicks you don’t need to and a low click through rate because your ad’s are displaying when they shouldn’t be.

This technique basically details which phrases you do not want your advert to appear for, so for example if you are sell used cars but don’t sell vans, then you may use the words van and vans as negative keywords so that people looking for vans don’t click onyour advert and cost you money.  The benefits of using negative keywords are:

• Reduce unwanted clicks
• Improve your Click Through Rate
• Improve your bounce rate
• Improve your conversion rate
• Help your budget to go further and attract more targeted visitors to your website

First of all you need to work out what your negative keywords will be, one way of doing this is by referring back to your keywords research and seeking out non relvant phrases that have a high volume of searches, one of the most commonly used negative keywords is ‘jobs’.  Once you understand what they are you can add them to your PPC campaign to make sure that you do not appear when these words are typed into the search engines.

Make sure you monitor your campaigns consistently so that you can pick up any additional negative keywords that have slipped through the net. It can be more difficult to incorporate if you have double meaning to a word or phrase, for example car service could mean a car garage or repair centre or it could be someone looking for a taxi firm, airport pickup.  So you will need to decide based on visitor behaviour from these kinds of keyphrases whether they are worth keeping in your PPC campaign of whether you should rely on organic traffic.

A long tailed keyword is basically a more descriptive version of a keyword, so instead of searching for ‘jacket’ you might search for ‘black leather jacket UK’.  On an individual basis they do not account for a particularly large number of searches but they are far more likely to result in sales.  In terms of converting traffic into customers, this is the second most valuable kind of search term as people are very late on in the buying stage, they know exactly what they want and are far more likely to buy.

In terms of a marketing campaign they can form a really effective part of your strategy, there tends to be less competition in the search engines for these kinds of phrases and so it requires less work to achieve higher rankings.  So it may be worth generating 50 targetted people to come to your website rather than 150 people who don’t really know what they want.

It can also help you to achieve high search engine rankings for the shorter keywords too, in fact one of the best ways to get these meaty keywords is to target long tailed keyphrases that include the words that you are really after.  It kind of has a knock on effect to your current efforts.

Research has shown that using long-tailed keywords can increase your conversion rate by around 200% compared to short keywords and so this gives a great opportunity for a business.  In fact as a smaller business in a highly competitive market, it gives you a way to be able to compete and gain results as often trying to compete with a national chain can be cost prohibitive.

So when you are working out a strategy for SEO or PPC, think about striking the right balance between the volume of searches, how competitive those searches are and the likely conversion rates.  By looking at these different elements you can create a campagin specifically targetted to your budget, overall objectives and specific product range.

Your prospects are spending more of their time online and so how to you reach them now that traditional methods of advertising are becoming less and less effective.  Well WSI Local Adworks is PPC platform that is aimed at local businesses like yours, looking to do exactly that.

There are a number of differences between running say an Adwords campaign and a WSI Local Adworks campaign, the first difference is the reach that Adworks gives.  The platform allows us to advertise across all of the different search engines with the same campaign, this allows us to tightly control and monitor your overall PPC efforts to ensure that we can firstly optimise your campaign to get the best click costs, but secondly and most important it allows us to hone the campaign to those variables that are getting you the best conversions.

There are lots of companies out there cold calling businesses at the moment offering packages for £100 per month to manage PPC for them. What people don’t realise is that in the majority of cases they bid against keyphrases that have low volume search traffic. This means that your budget doesn’t get used up each month and the company managing this for you pocket the difference. They will also often tie you into long term contracts that are then very difficult to get out of. I have come across cases where the management company is earning up to £80 per month whilst only £20 is actually being spent on PPC. Make sure you understand where your money is going and ask for access to your reporting so you can keep an eye on how it is going.