If you’re running a PPC campaign you know how expensive top keywords can get.

Search Marketing Standard’s series on Seven Habits of Highly Successful Search Engine Marketing gives solid and helpful advice on how to spend your online marketing budget wisely.

There are a couple of areas in Part II – Keyword Best Practices – that especially caught my interest.

Create Basic Keywords expands on the 5 types of keyword sets your campaign should encompass:

1. Root terms
2. Synonyms
3. Action Prefixes and Suffixes
4. Run-ons and Misspellings
5. Plurals (Google only)

By carefully developing, assessing, and using these 5 types, you will generate a well-rounded keyword universe for your campaign, with many less expensive yet highly effective keywords. The author notes that:

“If you create five root terms, five synonyms, 10 prefixes and suffixes, and use plurals, this will result in a list of 200 keywords. Add in another 20 misspellings and you are up to 220 keywords. Add in all 50 states, specific cities, and combining prefixes and suffixes on the same keyword, and you can see how these five simple rules can quickly build a keyword set for you without ever touching a fancy keyword tool!”

The other area of interest to me is negative keywords. There are two ways to use them. One is to create a list of generic negatives like “lawsuit, complaint, free, cheap, etc.” and append the ones that fit your service or product to your keywords.

The second way to use negative keywords is to find semantically related words that are not useful to searchers. You can save a lot of money if you specify, in your PPC campaigns, that your ads not be served if your negative words are part of the user’s search query. The author gives a clever example:

“…exclude the word “one” from an advertisement for “night stands” that are used for bedroom furniture.”

I have only highlighted parts of the post – be sure to hop on over to Search Marketing Standard and read the complete article. Your wallet will thank you!

Related Posts

1. Keyword Placement
2. Keyword Choices – Make or Break Your Site
3. Advanced Niche Keyword Analysis