Effective SEM - Use Negative Keywords Approapriately

Continuing on the theme of seven steps of effective SEM that I outlined in one of my previous posts, in this post I will discuss the fourth step (Use Negative Keywords Approapriately) in details. Note: All the examples used in this post are related to Google Adwords.


Being thoughtful about negative keywords is an important step in setting up effective search engine marketing campaigns. If you do not include the right negative keywords in your campaign, you will be wasting a lot of impressions resulting in significant increase of your advertising cost. For example, if you are an enterprise software provider and you do not want your ad to be shown to people searching for "free" software, you should use "free" as a negative keyword in your campaign.