The Importance of Keywords

In the world of marketing, particularly PPC marketing, you may hear things like "keywords are king" or that they are the most important piece of making an effective campaign.

This is true. It’s keywords that make or break a PPC campaign as this element determines who sees your ad and who can’t.

The thing is... there are actually a few different types of keywords and they all serve different purposes during the process of building out effective and optimized campaigns. Whether the keywords fall into the catergory of negative keywords or targeted keywords, it is your job to use them effectively to make a legendary campaign that provides the best ROI for our clients.

Targeted Keywords

How we target keywords initially is pretty straightforward and broad. We currently have a compiled list of some ideal keywords for clients in the addiction sciences fields and the mental health field. So, we start there and then hone it all in. Below is a video that will walk you through the way that we use client data to sharpen our targeted keywords and make the most out of our ad campaigns.

Aside from this method, which basically allows us to listen to the audience and what works, we can also use keyword research tools to determine some other juicy keywords to target in our campaigns. These can be especially useful if a campaign has started to die down or needs some revamped keywords.

Some great tools to generate hundreds of keyword suggestions:

While these tools are super helpful, its important to remember another helpful tool is your team. When in doubt, reach out to your team members to review some heavy hitting keywords that have good volume and value.

Leveraging Website Data for Keyword Research

Negative Keywords

It seems counterintuitive to call something a negative keyword but it really makes a lot of sense when you recognize the purpose that these words serve.

Negative keywords are terms and phrases you intentionally don’t want to have in your ads. With these kinds of keywords in your campaign, the failure is apparent. For example, we usually don't want to show up for people searching for the names of other programs as they aren't likely to want to come to us. It's a waste of budget if we have to pay for a click where we just forward them to the correct provider.

Other things to would be terms like "physical" or "senior" to avoid people searching for "physical rehab" or "senior rehab." We may also want to add terms like "AA" to our negative keyword list as these are people looking for free treatment, not something they might have to pay for.

The purpose of avoiding these keywords is to prevent your ads from showing up alongside search queries that are irrelevant, offensive, or don’t fit user intent.

Some tips for finding negative keywords for your PPC campaigns:

Always check your search query reports: For terms that are not a good fit for your ad purpose, define them as negatives from the setting before launching the ad
Define negative match types: The match type you assign to a negative keyword has an enormous impact on what traffic it blocks. Disqualify any query containing negative terms. For example, you'd never want to do a broad negative match for "rehab." While this would eliminate physical rehab and senior rehab searches, it would also eliminate drug rehab searches!
Research negative keyword options: The more negatives you set before a campaign goes live, the more cash you’ll save right off the bat

Key Terms, Negative Keywords, & More