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Hi. Today I'm going to talk about negative keywords, the most important issue in online
marketing, and the latest news on a retired tool that we�ll all desperately miss.
What's the point of negative keywords? You will find that there are certain phrases that
are being typed in, that you are paying for ads to be displayed for, and paying for the
clicks that you simply shouldn't be displayed for.
One classic example is when somebody�s typing things into their search engine along the
lines of free or cheap. Unless you are somebody who feels that being featured for those phrases
is going to lead to a conversion, there's absolutely no reason why you should be featured,
paying, have impressions against your CTR for those phrases. If you add them to your
negative keyword list, for example, just simply cheap and free, you will immediately be ruling
out people who are looking for something that's cheap or free.
Cheap of course is a very vague term, and cheap in itself may well not preclude that
particular prospect from doing business with you. Even if you're at the premium end of
the market, who knows what they mean by cheap? Be aware that words like that, and there's
a whole plethora, we typically have hundreds of negative keywords in an account. They are
more and more leading to a lower CTR because you are getting impressions for things that
you shouldn't get impressions for. Worst of all, you're paying to be clicked. Avoid it.
Do some work on what you're being clicked for and if you see a phrase in your search
query report that is absolutely not what you should be appearing for, make sure it's in
the negative keyword list.
What is the single most important thing you need to do to maximize your online presence?
For me, it's not necessarily traffic. Without a doubt, you're never going to get anywhere
without traffic, but the very first thing you must do is identify your value proposition;
identify your positioning, identify your USPs, your unique selling points, and pool that
together, put it in to the mixing pot, brainstorm it. Brainstorm it with people within and outside
your business. Try to get a sense of what it is that your prospects really, really want
to see. Once you've got a sense of that, that thing forms the absolute basis of your copy,
of the way you present your landing pages, your home page, your website in general. This
is starting point number one with any campaign we run with a client.
We've taken up to six hours in some circumstances to really totally understand the client's
value propositions, their USPs, and their positioning. Oftenwe're not just understanding
them. We are proposing differentiation. We are proposing ways that they can separate
themselves. Often it's not even reinventing their wheel. It's simply putting things in
a different light, turning it on its head, thinking outside the box.
How can we present this company in a way that differentiates from their opposition without
them having to change their offer? It's generally very simple, but you need to put the time
and effort in it to brainstorm. Brainstorming is absolutely key. Without a doubt, so is
traffic, but without a high-quality message, traffic is a waste of time.
This week, Google retired what they call "translated pages." This was a facility in the search
results that allow people to see search results in foreign language. That even extended to
typing in an English phrase but asking to see the results in another language. It was
a pretty low-use tool from what we can gather. We certainly hardly used it. I can imagine
there would be circumstances where it would have been very useful, but they have been
rare. That's being retired.
Of course it's focused on that incredible facility that the Google Chrome browser offers
which is to translate any webpage into another language. When you think about it, this is
amazing that such a facility exists. I'll be surprised if most people actually were
aware of it. It's built into the Google Chrome browser and it's a simple single-click situation
to get a whole webpage translated. Maybe useful to you if you're looking at distributors in
other countries, competitors, trying to get a sense of how other people are marketing
in your industry, or looking for ideas.