Search Engine Optimisation Blog

Those kind people at Wordtracker have just released a free service “Keyword Questions“.

We’ve used a combination of our keyword research and various software applications in the past to uncover the questions that searchers ask online. Why? Answering questions in the form of an article or blog post is a great way to give your site a boost in terms of increased visitor numbers. The search engines love to see fresh content that helps searchers to find the information they went online to research.

Wordtracker have done us all a favour by making this research available to all. Below is a screenshot from a question I asked about questions!

Wordtracker Keyword Questions

The data is from the US database so not perfect for UK online marketers but should still be a useful resource.

Thank you Wordtracker!

At Impact Media we pride ourselves in helping our clients increase the return on their Internet marketing investment.

Of course there are many ways we accomplish this but even if you have no plans to out-source your pay per click management to a professional agency, there are still plenty of things that you could (should) be doing in order to help yourself and reduce the wasted clicks, aka cost, going though your AdWords account.

One of the most powerful, yet under-utilised, techniques to use is that of negative keywords. A negative keyword, what on earth is that? Well, simply put it’s a word or phrase that when used will prevent your advert from showing if used in conjunction with another word or phrase that appears in your campaign.

For example, let’s say you sell blue widgets and you’re using a combination of match types to get the maximum exposure for this product. However, your keyword research has thrown up that there is a lot of searches for ‘used blue widgets‘. In this example, you would add the word ‘used‘ as a negative.

Although important with both broad and phrase matches, with Google’s synonym replacement on broad matches, it is imperative that anybody running an AdWords campaign has performed thorough keyword research to identify as many negatives as possible. Failure to do so will mean a poorly performing campaign costing far more than it need.