Local pay per click, if not done well, can end up costing you huge money. You need your ads to be tightly written and specifically targeted at people who are interested in your product. There´s no use in having 500 people click on your ad and go to your website if you don´t convert a single one because they thought you were selling something else.
One way to ensure that your traffic that comes in via local pay per click is very targeted is to use negative keywords. What are negative keywords? They are keywords that you don´t want your ads to show up for.
Let´s say you sell hope chests. You don´t want your ad coming up when someone types in something like “bodybuilding techniques for a big chest”, so you would need to select keywords that would show up in that phrase but wouldn´t be applicable to your business. These would be entered as negative keywords.
To find which keywords should be used, it´s useful to use a service like Wordtracker or Google´s Adwords tool to find similar or related phrases that come up with your keywords. This will let you know what people are searching for with your keywords in it. Take any irrelevant keywords and use them as your negative keywords in the local pay per click campaign. This will help ensure that your ads don´t even appear for non-relevant local advertising searches.
Negative keywords are a great way to avoid paying too much for your local pay per click campaigns. Research carefully and choose the words that are most likely to send you poor traffic and make sure you don´t end up paying for too many of those types of clicks!
