The Overlooked Power of Negative Keywords

Before I get into today's topic, a word or two about Overture's Keyword Selector Tool at inventory.overture.com.

Rumor has it that Yahoo is taking this site down. Lately it's been rather unreliable, sometimes available, sometimes not.

First, a plea for sanity to our friends at Yahoo Search Marketing: Guys, I know and you know that most people come to your site and take your handy keywords and go dump them into Google. I know that makes ya mad. 'Cuz Google passed you by 3 years ago and you've been trying to catch up ever since.

Yahoo, I submit to you that taking this keyword tool away can only drop your stock price even lower, because then Google advertisers will have one less reason to even know who you are, much less advertise on the Yahoo/Overture network. (When analysts at giant mutual funds who own $500 million of Yahoo stock call me on the phone and ask, that's what I tell 'em.)

Yahoo, the most strategic thing you can do is make your tool even better, and perhaps even put a link on this tool to some videos or something that explain how to use your own PPC system.

Oh, and just in case Yahoo decides to can this thing for good, there's a handy alternative available now at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ My thanks to Mike and Mindy Mindel for providing that.

Onward to the topic at hand.

Most people don't pay near enough attention to negative keywords. Or maybe they stick in words like "free" or "cheap" but usually that's not enough. Sometimes the total success or failure of your PPC campaign hinges on the proper use of negative keywords.

Here's an example - the keyword "soap." Here are the results you get from the Overture inventory tool:

Searches done in December 2006
Count Search Term
91393 soap opera
63090 soap
41891 soap opera digest
34895 soap central
21779 soap opera central
17220 soap making
13494 soap opera update
13439 cbs soap
12595 abc soap
7271 soap digest
6977 soap city
6794 soap dispenser
5608 soap opera weekly
5178 daytime soap
4974 handmade soap
4778 cbs daytime soap opera
4685 soap making supply
4629 soap dish
4525 daily soap opera update
4344 passions soap opera
4234 soap opera spoiler
4136 all my child soap opera
4099 young and the restless soap opera
3787 soap spoiler

If you're bidding on the keyword 'soap' and using anything other than exact match [soap] it's gonna be real, real hard to make this keyword work. If you sell soap related products, then the list you see here is actually more valuable in terms of the negative keywords it gives you (opera, digest, cbs, daytime) than the positive keywords (handmade, dispenser, dish).

So what you should do is bid this way:

[soap]
"soap"
soap

with negative keywords

-opera
-digest
-central
-cbs
-abc
-daytime
-passions
-children

....and you should go all the way down the list, plucking out as many negative keywords as you possibly can.

When you do that, your CTR on broad match and phrase match will go up, sometimes even double or triple. On a term like 'soap', broad and phrase match will probably not work AT ALL unless you have a very extensive list of negative keywords.

2-3 years ago on PPC, the name of the game was slinging a lot of mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. Today, less is more, and negative keywords are just the kind of 'less' that will sharpen your saw and make you effective.

One last thing: My bookstore book is out on the shelves now. If you give Amazon $16.47 and commit 10 minutes a day to reading The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, then 30 days from now you'll be smarter than 98% of all Google Advertisers. Not only about AdWords, but all essential online marketing skills.

For a blow-by-blow explanation of the book, why we wrote it (hint: I'm a self-aggrandizing egomaniac) and what's in it, go here:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/ultimateguide.htm

To your success,

Perry Marshall

De-Constructing Google Slap II

Most people will remember the "Google Slap" last July
when thousands of advertisers woke up to find their
minimum bids jacked up to $5.00 and $10.00 a click.
The official story was that it was a "landing page quality issue"
when in fact it was more like a "website content quantity" issue.

About 2 weeks ago they rolled in another change, this one
more subtle and affecting fewer people. But even if you
didn't notice directly, you can still probably see a shift if
you use the reports tab in your account to graph clicks
and / or impressions. Content traffic was affected the
most, for most people. Some people were severely affected.

***IMPORTANT OBSERVATION:
Having been through several rounds of this - and knowing
that the game is going to continue to evolve as time goes on,
with more Google slaps and more interesting twists - the
people who stay in the know always wind up on top and the
losers who get on discussion boards and bitterly complain,
continue to be losers. You get to decide whether to stay
plugged into reliable information - as well as provide
quality information to your visitors on your site - or keep
trying to cheat the system, which always eventually fails.***

OK, enough preaching. The core issue with Google Slap is:
There's a fringy aspect of AdWords where if your site is
small or if there's a mismatch between your ads / keywords
and web pages, Google will simply jack up your minimum bids.
When you call them they will NOT explain how to fix it. You're
on your own. Robots make these decisions, and the Google
rep on the other end of the line does not necessarily know the
formula anyway.

(I did *not* get a huge amount of emails about this. The
most heavily affected people were affiliates, people with
machine-generated AdSense pages, and people with skinny
little one- and two- page sites. Most of my customers aren't
doing that.)

Still, some people with legitimate, good quality sites
were slammed and today I'm going to give you some
tips that have made a big difference for some.

Here's a success story I got from one astute gentleman.
Pay close attention:

"Just FYI, in case you're still gathering info ... I beat Google's royal behind today:

- Added a site map, with a link to it of course
- Added a few low key outbound links to high page rank sites (very bottom of page)
- Removed the bullets from the penalized pages, and textualized them
- Added more SEO stuff (keyword rich anchor tags)
- Broke up my email articles and installed them throughout the site, linked into the sitemap

Nothing dramatic ... seems like they just tightened up the changes from round 1.

The thing is, WITH these changes, my quality score is better than it ever was
(I've now got 2 cent minimums on keywords which never had them, and that's
without any traffic coming through, strictly from the spider food)."

Don't forget that with most of these changes, while some
people loudly lose, others quietly win. I talked to a number
of people whose ads shot up to the top after this latest change.
Of course some people benefitted, because some of their
competitors disappeared.

Marketing Intelligence Wizard Glenn Livingston put it this way:

"Now that landing page is part of the quality score, it actually
provides a potential ADVANTAGE to smart advertisers who do it right.

"Just as with writing a hyper-relevant ad that gets high
click through, you can now improve your position and reduce
your ad costs when you do what Google wants. And even if it
DOES reduce opt in rates, you get compensated for this by
the reduced click costs. It's not just a matter of minimum
bids, ... the quality score is a continuum which influences
your position, # of clicks, etc., even when you ARE bidding
above the minimum."

One of my own campaigns - one that I could never get
below 5-6 cents a click - is now taking 4 cent clicks.
Haven't tried 3 cents yet. Google Slap 2 has been good to me.

Having been through several rounds of this, and knowing that
more are coming (as Google's senior staff assures me), this
is what goes on out there:

-The average 'man on the street' Google advertiser thinks
that Google is just trying to shake him down for more money,
every six months or so.

-Marketers who truly understand Relevance - who create
sites that are so sticky that nobody wants to click the BACK
button - continue to do better and better. When Google
introduced Quality Score a year and a half ago, my tuned-in
Renaissance Club Members got cheaper clicks. When Google
Slap happened this past summer, they got more clicks for
less. When Google Slap happened two weeks ago, they got
even more.

Losers lose. Winners win.

If you're not a Renaissance Club member, give it a test drive.
It's a hard deal to turn down - you get $500 of stuff sent to
you in the mail for $29.95, just for giving it a good College Try:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/club

Have a Great Thanksgiving Celebration.

Perry Marshall

Google AdWords vs. Free Search Engine Rankings

This Article Was Written By Perry Marshall

A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks on
search engines with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors with
what's called "search engine optimization" - loading up your web
pages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or
#3 or #1 on Google's free search.

Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, but
there are some big IF's that you need to consider first!

Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten
words and phrases - not hundreds - so you should choose
very, very carefully.

But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHT
words and phrases to optimize for.

Now here's the kicker:

If you don't use a pay per click strategy to determine which
words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will
almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you
initially think you want are almost always different than the ones
that actually work - believe me, I've made that mistake many
times.

Considering it takes 30 days to several months to see
results when you're playing the search engine optimization
game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords.

When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you'll
see that there are almost always a few really productive words
and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead
of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are
not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.

Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases have
varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1
ranking for the phrase "Digital Camera" it's going to be
a LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for "Kodak DX6340"
which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be
much more targeted, too. When you do search engine
optimization, you must pick battles you can win.

So here's the lesson: Use my Definitive Guide to Google
AdWords to properly set up a pay per click campaign,
determine which keywords are productive, THEN do
search engine optimization based on what really works.
Then you'll get all kinds of free traffic and even more
income from your website:

Recommended Tools From Perry Marshall...

The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords

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Best,

Perry Marshall