Author: Kirt Christensen

There are times when a place is linked to a business. Let's say that you owned a casino, You may find that you can get more less expensive traffic bidding on "Niagara Falls" than just bidding on "Casino."

For local businesses, take whatever keywords apply to your business and then add your state and as many close-by cities as possible. For example, a Cincinnati IT firm might use this list, which includes suburb names and deliberate misspellings of "Cincinnati":

Ohio computer consultant

Cincinnati computer consultant

Cincinati computer consultant

Cincinatti computer consultant

Tri-state computer consultant

Tri state computer consultant

Eaton computer consultant

Jamestown computer consultant

Miamisburg computer consultant

Sidney computer consultant

Troy computer consultant

Milford computer consultant

Loveland computer consultant

Go to a map site and paste in a list of cities, then use an Excel spreadsheet to mix and match those terms. Use "computer consultant," "IT company," "IT consultant," etc.

With a lot of keywords you have the keys to untapped markets, lower bid prices, higher CTR, and success as a PPC manager. Effort put forth here will pay you back many times over.

There is a secret to multiplying your keyword list by three as well as bidding on keywords overlooked by the competition.

To really maximize your base keyword list use brackets and quotes. In his tool AdWords Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com), Stephen Juth helps identify variations that are less pricey and for which there is less competition.

Creating a comprehensive list of keywords can be a tiresome labor of love and it may be a temptation to leave out a singular or plural or overlook the synonyms that may be related to one or more of your niche keywords.

There is an additional feature that Google provides that can help you with that difficulty, Expanded Phrase Matching adds singulars, plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms where they may be lacking in your keyword list.

Care is warranted here. This feature works for your broad matched keywords, not for your exact matches and phrase matching on your list of phrases.

Broad-Matched Keywords

Keyword phrases that fall under this category are the ones that you use when setting up your campaign that don't have any categorizing marks on them. Such as:

used cars

Japanese used cars

used cars for sale

You need to be cautious, because if you don't provide negative keywords, that keyword phrase "used cars" will show your ad for all of the following searches:

used cars

german used cars

used cars cleveland

used police cars

Your ad might even come up when someone searches this cockeyed phrase:

cars used in filming dukes of hazzard

Phrase Matches

Keywords with quote marks on them fall under this category. Such as:

"used cars"

"Japanese used cars"

"used cars for sale"

Having quotes on your keywords will have your ad showing up when searches are done on these search terms in this order with no other words filled in, as shown in this list:

used cars

old Japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

But your ad will not appear in this search:

used police cars

Exact Matches

Place square brackets around your words to make exact matches. Such as:

[used cars]

[Japanese used cars]

[used cars for sale]

With these keywords, only people who typed in these exact phrases, in this order, will see your ad. None of the following keyword searches will show your ad:

used cars chicago

german used cars

old japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

used police cars

Remember that if you include negative keywords in your lists, you'll pull down the number of impressions that your ads get because they'll show for fewer searches, which means that your CTR will automatically go up. But notice the math of this: If you could pull down your number of impressions by 20 percent, your CTR would improve not by 20 percent, but by 25 percent. Likewise:

If you cut unwanted impressions by 30 percent, your CTR will increase by 42 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 40 percent, your CTR will improve by 67 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 50 percent, your CTR will double.

The use of negative keywords can really give your broad/phrase matching keywords a boost, but they won't change anything for your exact match keywords. By managing your pay-per-click well, the use of negatives can make a big difference.

Need to optimize or "fix" your Adwords & PPC campaigns? Kirt Christensen manages over $600k in PPC spending & knows what it takes to make your account hum! When it comes to ppc outsourcing, he's the man!