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Digital Marketing & SEO vocabulary · Paid Search and Advertising

Negative keyword

Meaning in digital marketing & SEO, with examples

nounCommon term

In digital marketing & SEO, negative keyword means: A word or phrase added to a paid search campaign so that the ads do not show for searches that contain it.

In Turkish: negatif anahtar kelime, hariç tutulan anahtar kelime

How it is used

Used to stop wasted spend on irrelevant clicks. PPC teams add negative keywords and build lists of them, often after checking the search terms report. Typical examples for some businesses are 'free', 'jobs' or 'second-hand'.

Example sentences

  1. Add 'free' as a negative keyword; we're paying for people looking for free templates.

  2. The new negative keyword list saved us about 15% of the budget last month.

Common collocations

  • add negative keywords
  • negative keyword list
  • search terms report
  • wasted spend
  • keywordA word or phrase that people type into a search engine, and that marketers choose to target with their pages or ads.
  • match typeA keyword setting in paid search that controls how closely a search must match the keyword for an ad to show: broad, phrase or exact match.
  • PPCShort for pay-per-click: an advertising model in which the advertiser pays each time someone clicks an ad, not when the ad is shown.
  • CPCShort for cost per click: the amount an advertiser pays for one click on an ad, often reported as an average over a campaign.

More terms: Paid Search and Advertising

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