Press "Enter" to skip to content

AdWords Negative Keyword Research: Related Search Method

Video Transcript

In this video, I’m going to show you my Google Related Search Method for identifying negative keywords – pretty simple method but very important one. And for this example, we’re going to pretend that we’re a company that sells cotton sweatshirts. So we’ll type cotton sweatshirts in the Google search, and if we scroll all the way to the bottom of the search results here, we see this little list “Searches related to cotton sweatshirts.”

This are the keywords that Google thinks that are related to cotton sweatshirt – and they pretty much all are- but notice that not all related searches have the whole term, “Cotton sweatshirts” on them. We see cotton hoodies, wool sweatshirts, cotton sweaters. What’s going on here is basically, Google’s using their broad match function, and they’re matching hoodies, and sweaters to the word, “sweatshirts.” They’re matching wool to the word cotton. Now the same thing is going to happen with your broad match keywords in your adwords account. This method is a quick way of identifying some of these broad match terms that Google might match your own keywords with.

In this case, if we don’t sell hoodies, if we don’t sell sweaters, if we don’t sell wool sweatshirts – we’re going to want to add these all as negative keywords. And you can expand out on this, also by clicking on any one of these. If we click on women’s cotton sweatshirts, scroll down and see their related searched for that – so maybe in this case we need to exclude, organic, or fleece, depending on what we’re selling obviously. But this is how we’re going to find some of those broad match terms that Google likes to use, and exclude those from our searches if necessary.