Hi, Mike Mancini with PPC Video Training.com.

Today we are talking negative keywords. Now, while I could pretty much have a whole play list on negative keywords and what they could do for your campaign and if they’re not implemented correctly, obviously what they could do to waste your ad spend.

A lot of the time, the questions we get aren’t necessarily how to add them or how important they are, but where do you start out with getting good negative keywords to add to your campaign.

Today, we’re going to share our negative keyword list with you.

Let’s Put Together a Negative Keyword List

So quickly for those that are unfamiliar with negative keywords. Negative keywords are keywords that we add to a campaign that if someone types in one of these keywords, it makes sure that your ad will not show up.

These are preventing your ads from showing up where you don’t want them to. So what we’re doing here is we have put together a list, and as you can see right here, of 2323 as of right now negative keywords. These are all from different industries, but they’re also some very general ones.

People also say, “Well, how do we know if we have enough negative keywords?” The number one rule is you will never be finished. Keyword and search intent has changed over the past several years.

A good example would be we used to have a lot of people when looking for service businesses, they might type in “Plumber 55317” which would be their zip code. That has changed a lot. Now, people do still type that in, but we are seeing a complete shift where people are now just typing in “Plumber near me,” because they realize that the search engines know exactly where they’re at and they will show them relevant search results.

Let’s be honest, if you’re moving around, especially doing a mobile search, you might not have any idea what zip code you’re in. So, intent has changed as people have realized the search engines are getting smarter.

Should I Add Geographical Areas to My Negative Keyword List?

Another example would be a geographical search. If I was looking for a dentist, I might type in “Dentist near me,” but perhaps I work a couple of towns over or I work in a different suburb of the city I’m looking for a dentist in. I might be looking for a dentist for my child, so I might type in “Dentist Minneapolis.” That’s not necessarily where I’m at when I’m doing the search, but I’m looking for other locations.

We’re starting to see that if you’re not adding in these negative keywords, I may just be … I live in Chanhassen, Minnesota, so if I’m a dentist, I probably don’t advertise in Minneapolis. That’s 20 minutes away and it’s probably better to spend my marketing dollars locally versus 20 minutes away where I’m going to have a harder time luring people to drive out to the suburbs to get their teeth cleaned. So, if this were my market, I would be obviously advertising Minneapolis as a negative keyword.

You can find those through your search terms. When you’re in your campaign, go to your keywords and then look under search keywords and you’ll be able to find a number of keywords in there that you probably don’t want your ad showing up for.

We have literally started seeing where people are in Minneapolis this might be the local market, but they’re looking for a dentist in Kentucky, because like I said, they might be traveling here for work and they’re doing a search while they’re here, but they’re looking for a dentist for their kid back home.

So, one way we would do that is we would make sure that we go over to the geography tab, and we would take every state in this keyword list as well as every state abbreviation, other than ours, and we would add those to the negative keyword list. We would start right there.

Don’t Skip The General Keywords Tab

We would also start in the general area. These are a lot of negative keywords that people might type in. So, for instance, if somebody is looking for PPC Training and I’m advertising that, if somebody types in PPC Training blog, that might be one, but I don’t think I want to pay to advertise my blog. So if somebody types in the keyword blog, my ad would not show up.

But these are a lot of general keywords that we see people type in over the years and I would go through these general keywords and make sure that if somebody typed in your biggest keyword and then see if any of these fit, and even if they don’t, add them in there. It’s always better to be safe than sorry. But as you go through here, there are a number of different lists.

So for instance, here is a cheap bargain and price shopper list. This is if you are trying to avoid people who are looking for something for free, looking for cheap or bargain prices, or they’re basically doing some research, but they are not ready to purchase. They might be doing reviews, whatever it might be.

But for instance, we’ll find people who are doing searches for floor refinishers, and they might be looking for cheap floor refinishers. Well, if I was a floor refinishing business, I might not want to advertise for people looking for cheap. Those tend to be very difficult customers. They probably are expecting more than they want to pay for.

They’re trying to always price shop and drive the price down. Sometimes I may just want to avoid that, so I would type these keywords into my negative keyword list, cheap, cheapest, deal, free, freebie. You get the idea.

But on every one of these lists, there’s a little explanation of this is a list for avoiding searches by people who if they have a computer campaign, this might be a negative keyword list for somebody who is selling computers. If somebody typed in the word computer game, you don’t want your ad showing up, so that’s why game would be a negative keyword.

Industry Specific Keywords

But we’ve put together a number of different industries on this list, and as you scroll through it and you get to the end, there are four other lists. These are titled, automotive, health, real estate, and travel. Now these are keywords who are for people looking to advertise in the automotive space, you might want to add these keywords to your campaign.

So, if you have an automotive campaign, maybe it’s automotive repair, you might want to add these to your campaign. These are very specific. Antique, auction. You want to make sure that the word career is a negative keyword to a campaign if you’re an automotive repair shop. But you can go through these, automotive employment, automotive insurance.

Here’s one for real estate, so if you have a real estate campaign, you might want to take a look at these keywords. Here’s another one for travel. As with everything that we do in our industry, these are guidelines and are suggestions.

Always make sure you go through all the keywords that you’re going to add to your negative keyword list before you add them. You don’t want to be going in there and adding a negative keyword that’s going to keep your ads from showing up if it’s an area that you absolutely want them to show up in. So, make sure you review them carefully.

Now these are not necessarily keywords that we have come up with ourselves, but we’ve got them through other lists, we’ve gotten them from campaigns that we have been working on, just that we put together literally over the last 10 years. This is always growing. With that said, your negative keyword scraping is never, ever done. We have campaigns literally with 1500 negative keywords in them.

Down below this video, there will be a link where you can download the spreadsheet for free, and once again, this is a guideline. Remember just to treat it as a guideline. You’re always going to be growing it, always going to be making it better, but we hope that helps.

Thanks so much for watching our video: 2322 Negative Keywords For Your Google Ads Campaign

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Also, check out these other articles and videos in our “Google Ads Negative Keywords” series.

What Are Negative Keywords in Google Ads

How to Find Negative Keywords for Your Google Ads

How to Add Negative Keywords in Google Ads