Don’t let you ads show up somewhere that would be harmful to your business!

If you sell airplanes, you certainly don’t want to appear on a page talking about a horrific plane crash. The same goes for a pet food seller and an article about the recent pet food poisoning incident. There are some things you can research ahead of time, but some may only come up with the winds of change.

I recommend: Stay on top of your brand name and topics related to your business using Google Alerts or Google Trends. 

Pursue high volume traffic without the risk

Negative keywords allow you to go after high volume search terms without appearing for unrelated searches. If you appear for an unrelated search, your click through rate (and thus ad position and cost per click) can suffer. Plus you could be spending money on clicks that ultimately won’t convert because the searcher wasn’t looking for a product or service you offer.

I recommend: Research your highest cost keywords using Google AdWords' Keyword Tool. Choose 'Possible Negative Keywords' from the drop down menu to get their help in selecting negatives for your campaigns. You should come up with a list of at least a dozen possible contenders.  Other options are: Yahoo's Keyword Research Tool and WordTracker (paid subscription).

Help focus your campaigns on your target audience

Make sure your keyword campaigns know your business as well as you do. If you’re a B2B company only focused on Fortune 1000 businesses, make sure to use terms like ‘small’ and ‘SMB’ as negatives in your campaign. If you’re a specialty clothing merchant only selling baby clothes, you may want to include keywords such as ‘womens’ and ‘mens’ as negatives.

I recommend: Continue your keyword research using Google AdWords' Keyword Tool. This time make sure to search using keywords that describe your business, not just the top volume terms.  Also review non-direct competitors that may share your main search term but don't have the same business goals.

How to start using negative keywords on Google AdWords

AdWords is one of the easiest places to start using negative keywords. There are two versions you can pursue: Campaign negative keywords and AdGroup level negative keywords. Except in very specific cases, you can put all of your negative keywords at the Campaign level. Simply navigate to: ‘Edit Campaign Negative Keywords’ under the Tools menu to enter your keywords. To use AdGroup level negative keywords, you can type your keywords directly into the AdGroup simply by placing a negative sign (-) directly in front of the term.

I recommend: Don't wait another moment.  Log into your AdWords account and get started right now!