One of the more prominent ways to get more visitors to your website is Paid search. Paid search, using search engines and paying money to get high rankings, is still effective. It’s great for Inbound marketing , from increasing brand awareness to getting more sales conversion and getting higher traffic.   

One of the more popular ways of getting higher traffic is to use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. PPC is a great way of driving traffic because you only pay whenever someone clicks on your Ad. However, if your PPC campaigns aren’t properly set up it can deliver you unnecessary traffic, which can become incredibly expensive. 

This is where negative keywords come in. Negative keywords are the keywords that stop ads from being served. For example, if you are trying to rank for inbound marketing, you might want to add the negative keyword “sales” since inbound sales are also part of the strategy. 

Where can we find out what keywords people are searching for? 

There are two places where you can easily find out what people are searching for. 

1. Search Terms Report 
   1. You can see her where people look for when they click on your Ads. When looking at the lowest conversion rates and the highest bounce rates you can see which Ads performed and which didn’t. 
2. Google Keyword Planner 
   1. Google Keyword Planner is a great way to find out which keywords people search for when they are searching for your brand. 

Negative keywords are not a “set-and-forget" method. You need to regularly check your data and make sure you stay on top of words and terms that cost you a lot of money and aren’t converting. 

How to make sure you have the right negative keywords 

It is of course not easy to find the right negative keywords to add to your list. A lot of it comes down to finding out the search intent. If someone is looking for  “inbound marketing tips” they are probably interested in inbound marketing in general. However, if they are looking for “inbound marketing plan” they are more interested in the actual implementation of Inbound marketing. 

It’s important to make sure you understand the intention that the user has with their search. This way you can get rid of the unnecessary keywords and know for sure these are the right keywords. 

Are you looking to optimise your paid search? Get in touch below to talk to us about the options.