How to think Negatively about the Right Key Words (think L O N G tail)

In this post I'm going to share a real world example of how identifying and using keywords can make or break your paid and organic advertising efforts.  Full disclosure here - I own and operate a web-based business that sells memberships to organizations so that they can schedule employment interviews online.  Without descending into my normal promotional keyword laden explanation its simply a web-based scheduling tool that allows invitees to choose an interview time and date via email.  The last 7 years of my life have been so much about promoting this site that I tend to think of it in terms of keywords now.  But in the beginning, starting from scratch, I thought over paying for the keywords:  "interview scheduling" made me a marketing genius.

Until I leaned how to use Google Analytics.

Now, you'd think that anyone looking for a tool to schedule job interviews online would probably use that search term (or something like it) and you'd be kinda correct.  The problem was/is that a bunch of other people use this search term as well.  Any guesses?

Yep, as the acquisition section of my Google Analytics page shows...people who are looking to prepare for a job interview tend to get pulled in with that search term as well....and here's a news flash...there is a whole lot more of those people than there are potential customers for my website.  The net effect was me paying for a lot of clicks that translated into zero chance of a conversion.  As well as a lot of analytical noise in terms of understanding my site's traffic in general.  But wait...it gets better.  Guess who else tended to get caught up in this type of keyword search....

People who were:

• Looking up "schedules" for sports teams
• Looking up info for "scheduling" their citizenship "interviews"
• and for some odd reason, people looking to "schedule" something I still don't understand with the department store Macy's

The fact that my advertising was heavily targeted geographically to the United States didn't help with the above.

After some long and painful discussions about advertising spend with my business partner, I found two ways to better manage this key word targeting issue (not including some tweaks to key word "variants" which could be its own post).  

1. The first and easiest (this is some seriously low hanging fruit for anyone dealing with this problem) was the "negative key words" feature in Google Ads.  Once I understood that I could specifically exclude displaying my ads to some of these non customer audiences I began each day excitedly reviewing and gleefully "excluding" terms like "immigration", "nhl" and "Macy" by adding them to my negative key word listing.  One word of caution here....a balance between over and under exclusion needs to be found.  On second thought, I realized that Macy's is a big company and potential customer....so I didn't want to outright excluded them for this reason.  This led me to a better understanding of my second strategy.

2. The use of long tailed keywords (search terms consisting of phrases including multiple keywords) have been a god send.  When I started to craft and test keyword search terms of 3 to 5 words I was initially terrified by the sudden drop off in clicks and lower CPC I was being charged....I assumed I must be doing something wrong since apparently no one else was bidding me up on those search terms.  But the much higher conversion rate told me I was clearly doing something right.  It was harder to nail these down, so testing was key (and using webmaster and Google trends helped for sure).  The added bonus was that I started spending a lot less time every morning digging through piles of unrelated search terms to exclude.  In this case, less advertising traffic was actually a good thing.  This article sums up the benefits I experienced to a "T".  I'd love to show you a current list of my tested and time refined long tailed keywords so you can see just how unintuitive some of them turned out to be (but that aint going to happen and sorry, yes I was being sarcastic).  Suffice it to say, you probably would be able to guess about 50% of them but split testing adds and rotating key words into different slots in the tail resulted in some surprises in terms of what worked best.  

Of course this isn't a set and forget it exercise.  Both the long tail keywords and negative keywords need constant review...but at least now we are building our brand and making money while we do this (and my business partner isn't scheduling long painful discussion about our relationship anymore).

Interesting side note, I recently attended a digital marketing conference and tuned into a session titled "Why you need to focus on the Long Tail" with no idea what it was about.  Its true, I sadly went 7 years not knowing what I was calling multiple key word phrases had the much catchier name of "Long Tail Keywords" (definitely part of why I'm currently completing formal marketing courses).

Understanding these competing audiences and the value of LTKWs and negative keywords has allowed my business to flourish while opening up more sophisticated options for content and direct marketing in the future.