The Importance of Negative Keywords

I was surfing yesterday, catching up on news. I noticed an article about a man who was grieving the loss of his wife years after her death. Having experienced the loss of a loved one taken too early and overwhelming grief, I decided to read the article.

The article went on to review the circumstances that lead to the woman’s death after having received a series of chiropractic adjustments to her neck and then suffering a stroke. While reading this very sad story, I happened to glance at the ads in the right hand column of the page. There were two Google ads, the first was “#1 Tool for Chiropractors (Free Video) How to get people to become patients in your office.”  Ok, so maybe there were some chiropractors reading this article as it mentions their field, but it doesn’t seem to be in the best taste to be listed next to this article.

The second ad really threw me; it was an ad where you could search for a chiropractor. Really? I don’t think right now would be the time to catch folks interested in chiropractic care.

There is a lesson in keywords here and that would be to include negative keywords. As defined on Google’s site: “Negative keywords – There’s another type of keyword that works in a different way. Negative keywords help make sure that your ad doesn’t show for searches that include that term. They work in unison with your normal keywords to target your ads just to the audience you want.

For example, add “free” as a negative keyword if you want to make sure your ad isn’t shown to people looking for a free product. Negative keywords contain a dash in front of the keyword like -free.” Words like “malalignments, lawsuits, and death” would have been good additions to the keywords attached to this ad and would have prevented the ad from showing up. In this case a negative can definitely be a positive!

So plan carefully and make sure your keywords get you in front of potential customers, not place you somewhere you shouldn’t be! We have some left brainers here to help you plan your next step with Google Adwords or anything else in the digital space, so give us a click! DiscoverForce5.com


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