Negative broad match keywords are the ones used by default. Essentially, they will hide your ad from search whenever someone types in a query with every one of your keyword terms.
But, if the person leaves out one or more words from the search query, the ad will still be shown.
For example, imagine that you are starting a landscaping business and have found that your business shows up when people are searching for “gardening store.”
The people searching for “gardening store” are likely searching for a store that sells gardening supplies, not a business that provides landscaping services. Although this is an obvious difference in search intent, Google does not understand this.
So you have to help Google understand, and by excluding negative keywords like « gardening store,” « hardware store,” and similar keywords from your landscaping business website, you may be able to teach Google how to get your site in front of the people that have an actual want or need for landscaping services.
Excluding the negative keyword “gardening store” and related negative keywords from on-site content may negate any queries that include part of the entire keyword but -even in instances where the words are not in the same order.
Here are a couple of examples where the ad would show:
- Landscaping Services
- Landscaping near me
And here are a few examples where the ad would hopefully not show:
- Store for gardening beg
- Hardware and gardening
- Best gardening store near me
Excluding negative keywords doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t rank for those terms. If the content on your site is similar to other content ranking for those negative keywords, or you have a backlink profile of gardening stores, then you may still discover your landscaping business site ranks for negative keywords even when they have been thoroughly removed from all on-site keywords.
In other words, while excluding negative keywords can help you to not rank for unwanted keywords and to reduce unwanted discovery, there are other factors that can limit the effectiveness of excluding these keywords.
