What are ‘negative keywords,’ and why should we care?

Question: What do you do about negative keywords? Do you just want to avoid using them on your pages, or is there a way to proactively “block” searchers using them?

Answer: Negative keywords are used primarily in the PPC / AdWords arena, and are not a big issue in terms of SEO. A medical malpractice attorney, for example, might identify the negative keyword ‘insurance’ in the search ‘Medical Malpractice Insurance.’ This indicates a doctor trying to buy Medical Malpractice insurance, certainly not a prospect for a medical malpractice attorney!

In terms of SEO, it doesn’t really matter if a person lands on the page by this sort of search. But, if you proceed to do AdWords / PPC – Google Advertising, you ‘pay per click’ and in that sense the negative keywords are very important. You exclude them in the AdWords interface, and thereby avoid having to pay for useless clicks.

Even if you are not advertising now, you might in the future. So I recommend to my students that you identify your negative keywords in your keyword worksheet. That way, you have done some of this hard thinking now as you lay out your keywords strategy.