Most eCommerce store owners make use of Google Adwords which has far become a great tool for advertising and promoting online. We use this to advertise and attract people to click and visit our stores.

But are you using your Adwords account effectively? Are you not wasting money on clicks that are NEVER going to convert to sales?

Though you might have a goal to get a lot of potential customers to visit your store, if you’re NOT doing it right, it would still be ineffective and will waste your money.

How To Use Keywords Effectively

Step 1: Avoid Using Broad Match Keywords

If you just type a keyword into Adwords it will show all broad matches for this keyword, relevant or not. It will include phrases containing your keywords, including misspelled words, synonyms and whether it’s in singular or plural forms. This helps you spend less time on building keyword lists. However, this gets your ads shown on search results that may be irrelevant to you. This doesn’t give you any good.

Let’s say you set a broad match keyword for “purple flowers in Australia“. Your ads will definitely show for all of these searches:

• purple flowers found in Australia
• purple background
• purple flower names
• flowers wallpaper
• markets in Australia

And you will NOT gain anything from all of these searches. It’s like you’re throwing your money away with these irrelevant traffic.

Learn how to become an effective and successful Virtual Assistant. Get your free cheat sheet.

Step 2: Use Exact Match Or Phrase Match Keywords

Phrase match shows your ad for searches that has your exact keyword even with words before or after it. This makes you available to more potential customers than random online surfers only.

To use phrase match, you’ll simply need to enclose your keyword/phrase in quotation marks like “purple flowers“.

“purple flowers” will display ads like the following:

• purple flowers in Australia – MATCH
• purple flowers – MATCH
• red flowers – NO MATCH
• purple flowers for sale – MATCH
• fresh purple flowers – MATCH
• purple background – NO MATCH
• flower wallpaper – NO MATCH

Exact Match will only show your ads when there’s a search query for that exact keyword. It will not display your ads if someone search query has additional words before or after it. This is used when you target specific search queries than broad match or phrase match.

To use an exact match keyword, enclose your keyword/phrase in brackets like [purple flowers].

[purple flowers] will display ads like the following:

• purple flowers in Australia – NO MATCH
• purple flowers – MATCH
• red flowers – NO MATCH
• purple flowers for sale – NO MATCH
• fresh purple flowers – NO MATCH
• purple rose flowers – NO MATCH
• flowers in purple – NO MATCH

Is there anything you can gain when you spend a lot on irrelevant broad match searches?

I don’t think so.

It would be best to start your Adwords campaigns with exact or phrase match keywords first as these display on highly relevant searches and can reach more potential customers than random clickers.

Step 3. Use Negative Keywords To Improve Search Targeting

Just as important as the keywords you want to be found for are the keywords you DON’T want to be found for.

Negative keywords are used to prevent your ads from showing to search results that are irrelevant to your store. This will help you reach the most potential customers and increase your sales without spending too much on irrelevant clicks that will not  convert.

You can either use a Tool or copy our Master List to get a good list of Negative Keywords with less efforts.

Negative Keyword Tool

You can use a Negative Keyword Tool to generate the list of negative keyword list for you. You may use Word Stream  which offers a search tool where you can enter a relevant keyword and the tool will automatically display potential negative keywords for you. Since it displays random list of negative keywords, you need to go through each of the list and decide which one is relevant to your store and which are not.

Negative Keyword Master List

You can also copy our Negative Keyword Master List for your convenience. For easier download, separate Text files of these Negative Keywords lists are available at the end of this article.

It also important that we add swear words to our Negative Keywords List. This is sometimes referred to as Banned List in some forums. You may go to  http://www.bannedwordlist.com/ to get a list of these.

Negative Keywords Lists For Download (In Text Format)

Most-Common-eCommerce-Negative-Words
Employment-Keywords
Avoiding-Price-Shoppers-Keywords
Reference-Keywords
No-Bargains-Keywords
Retailers-Keywords
Education-Keywords
Research-and-Information-Keywords
Small-Business-Keywords
Manufacturing-Keywords

Click here to download your free Cheat Sheet on how to become an effective and successful Freelance Virtual Assistant.

Photo courtesy of Freepik from javi_indy