Using Negative Keywords For Search Engine Optimization
What if the big three searche engines allowed the use of negative keywords for a sites organic search rankings?
Adam Green and I were chatting the other day and he dropped this interesting question on me. What if the big three search engines allowed a webmaster through webmaster tools to specify a set of negative keywords for which the site should not rank for. From a quality and lead generation perspective SEO and PPC are quite similar in that as SEO’s we want to get qualified traffic to our sites - so why not allow us to filter out keywords which we know are bouncing or producing poor results?
For example - site A ranks well for “self storage” and as a result gets traffic for terms such as “self storage backup” or “rv storage” both of which are low quality traffic keywords for site A. Why not specify”-backup” and “-rv” into a list of negative keywords in webmaster tools?
Can anyone see why this would be a bad idea for webmasters, the search engines or the users of search engines? I think it improves the overall quality of the search experience for everyone involved.
Perhaps this has been discussed before, but I’ve not come across it in the context of organic results. Please comment - I am interested in what everyone has to say about it.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hi Chris,
I think that there’s a distinct difference between PPC and organic search in this context.
The reason you want to target quality, qualified traffic using negative keywords in your PPC campaign is that you’re paying for your clicks, so you don’t want to be paying for clicks that are unlikely to result in a conversion.
With organic SEO, it can quite often be a numbers game. Even thouugh the prospect came to your site via a low quality search term, they may still convert. Why would you forego this opportunity by using negative keywords to stop people coming to your site? As it’s organic traffic, it’s not costing you anything, so the visitor is free anyway.
Even if you’re getting a 10% conversion with your PPC campaign, 5% with your organic SEO, and 1% from organic SEO with the keywords you’re thinking about removing via your webmaster tools, that 1% is still worth getting, as it didn’t cost you anything.
$0.02 please! :-)
March 27th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Yeah.. what if you were promoting an ebook or something you wanted to sell? And you kept getting search traffic from “free ebook” or something… that traffic will clearly be worthless.
March 28th, 2008 at 2:47 am
PPC and SEO are two different things…i think it would be really difficult in reality
March 28th, 2008 at 2:53 am
@ James - That traffic might be worthless (mind you, if I were getting search traffic for the term “free ebook”, I can think of a few uses for that traffic!), but remember, it didn’t cost you anything either.
I’ll take that traffic all day, every day. Even if you get ten visitors a month for a “worthless” term, and you convert at 1% (if your sales page is any good, you’d hope to), that’s one extra sale a year, which cost you absolutely nothing.
That would be a bit like asking customers at the door to your bricks and mortar business, as they approached your doors:
“Excuse me sir, are you intending on buying anything today?”
to which they reply:
“I don’t think so, I’m just at the browsing stage”
and you go on to say:
“Sorry sir, you’ll have to leave, we only allow people ready to purchase into our store”
It’s just bad business sense to turn away, or turn down *any* potential customers, whether they’re ready to buy, or just browsing.
@ Chris - the point you made at the end of your post about improving the quality of the search experience for everybody is interesting. I’m not sure you’ll find too many internet marketers interested in improving the overall search experience. I know for one that if I could grab the top ten spots in google for a competitive term and funnel all clicks to a single site, I’d do it.
Search experience be damned! ;-)
March 28th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Awesome points Stu! We’re not suggesting to use this as a means of turning away traffic that is the early research stage of the buying process but rather that traffic which is clearly not interested in what we offer. The example we gave was for preventing a regular storage site from ranking for a the keyword “RV Storage”. I suspect that this example is not good enough as this person is atleast interested in storing some things - as to your point.
I suppose this would work for totally unrelated terms. So, I guess I’m asking if anyone has a really good example of where this might work in organic results.
Regarding the quality of search - internet marketers should be concerned with that. If the overall quality of search degrades in a search engine, the use of that search engine declines and then your traffic dries up too. No, we’re in it for the long haul for all of our clients. We want long term sustainable results that grow their business with as little risk as possible :)
March 28th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Thanks for all the input everyone! I think it’s an interesting idea to consider.
March 30th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I think this would be a great use of the webmasters tool. I would definitely add negative words to make my users more relevant.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I would never turn away traffic, even if they did happen to be showing up on “free” related keywords. Maybe they want something for free, but a good website can occasionally (okay, rarely, but it does happen sometimes) convince people to pay for premium content.
The conversion rates are insanely low, but still more than enough to pay the bandwidth they eat, even if you’re not counting the intangible benefit of the brand exposure you get from the clicks.
The only reason I could see for excluding things is if you had some kind of self-hosted video or other bandwidth-intensive content that too many people were finding…but then again, the robots.txt file can accomplish that, too. It won’t let you filter by referring keyword, but that seems like a pretty rare need.