It’s been over a month since Google announced some changes to keyword match types and we have already noticed some challenges of key phrase modifiers. Here is a brief review of some of these challenges and possibly some solutions as well!
Low-Quality Keywords!
“Close variants” allow keywords to match to searches that are similar, yet not identical to the targeted keyword. It helps you to connect with people who are looking for your business—despite slight variations in the way they search. Thus, reducing the need to build out exhaustive keyword lists to reach these customers. Yes, it sounds great. But, one of the challenges of key phrase modifiers is that it apparently brings in A LOT of low-quality keywords now than it used to.
For instance, I got a snake emoji recently! I don’t even have the snake keyword. It’s always snake-control, snake-removal etc.
If you have recently run google ads, you might have noticed that a lot of competitor names have been coming in as well. Certainly, this is something you don’t want!
How can you remedy these? Andy Patel
Negative Keyword
There are a few ways to resolve these problems but the obvious one is the “Negative Keyword List”. Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your customers.
For negative keywords, you have to specify exact keywords because Google will not allow for variants. For example, If one of your competitors is “Tom’s Pest Control”, then you should put “tom”, “toms”, “tom’s” and maybe even “tommys” as negative keywords. Add as many of the variations as you possibly can because google will show you anything that you have not specified as a negative keyword.
You can simply scrape a list of competitor names and just add them to your list. You can easily find and hire freelancers from around the world through Fiverr.
Exact Match
Another approach that can work is to go for an exact match, even though it might not be the most optimal way. Exact Match is the Google keyword match type that allows you to show your ad when someone types the exact word that you are bidding on.
Exact match may seem more expensive initially but it can be very efficient in the long term by avoiding bad search terms.
Definitely keep an eye on your search terms to ensure everything is running smoothly. If you have any questions, you can send me an email or simply message me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. I will try and get back to all of you.
