What ACTUALLY Is A Google Ads Keyword?

if you're new to Google ads one of the most important things to understand is what actually is a keyword well I've been running Google ad campaigns since 2009 so I can definitely give you a concrete answer and that's exactly what I'm going to do in this video so when most people think about Google ads they think about search they think about you're going onto Google searching for something and then ads popping up that are closely related to whatever it is that you search for and that's the core of what Google is there are many other

elements to it but that's the core of Google advertising is still search so let me give a quick example I've got a tab open here with Google on it and let's say I click in here and I was to search for a solicitor in London let's say I was based in London and I need to hire a solicitor I could search for solicitors in London and then we can see that the top results that are popping up here are ads so anything that's got sponsored up here that's an ad so that's an ad that's an

ad that's an ad we' got three ads then we get into the map results and then we can keep going down and we start getting into the organic search results where people haven't necessarily paid to be there but they just rank on the search engine and therefore they show up so the core Google ads that's what it is that's what search is so a keyword is the information that you give to Google where you are basically saying to Google as a Google Advertiser I want my ads to show up when someone searches for this keyword

or something closely related to this keyword and I'll get into more information in that in a second but add it's very core that's what a keyword is it's information you give to Google where you say these are the keywords I want to bid on these are the keywords I want my ads to show for I want you to put my ads into the auction to compete against against other Google advertisers and I want my ads to have a chance of showing up because they're in the auction because I'm bidding on them and might people search

for them because I believe that people searching for these keywords are likely to go on and click on my ads and therefore come through to my website and purchase my products or inquire for my services or take an action that you want them to take that's what a keyword is however keywords are not the same as Search terms it feels like they should be but there is a big difference I'm going to explain what I'm talking about so I'm in an example Google ad account here and I'm going through the new campaign creation process just

to get to the keyword entering stage so we can talk through this right so let's say that search term that I just showed you the solistas in London let's add that in here right sists in London now if you enter that in as a keyword you might think great my ads are now going to show up when anyone searches for solicitors in London and that is true if you enter that in as a keyword but the difference between keywords and Search terms is that when you enter in solicitors in London as a keyword your ads

are also going to show up for lots of related searches so if we've got sisters in London in as a keyword our ad will show up when someone searches for sisters in London it'll also show up when someone searches for property solicitors in London or divorce solicitors in London what I am done and that may or may not be good for your business depending on which area which Niche within that overall industry you operating it's also going to show up for things like the best solicitors in London or solicitors in East London or solicitors in

South London or you know areas in which you might not operate so your ads will appear for lots of related terms that are Google deems to be related to the keyword not just the exact search now how far from your keyword Google actually goes in terms of deciding which searches to put your ads in front of depends on your match types and there are three different keyword match types and they affect how keywords work okay so this keyword that we've entered in here solicitors in London because there's nothing around that that make more sense in

a second that's gone in as a broad match keyword and Broad match as the name suggests is pretty broad Google has a lot of flexibility to put your ads in front of lots different searches that it thinks are related to solicitors in London like I already mentioned that can present problems because your ads could be put in front of search results where someone searching obviously isn't going to go ahead and become in this case a client they're not looking to hire a solicitor in London they might be looking at all sorts of things so if

you've got a broad match keyword for example you're ad could appear for someone searching for how to become a solicitor in London or how many solicitors are there in London those are obviously searches that you wouldn't want your ads to show for because that person is not looking to hire a sister in London so so that's broad match and that's the most Broad and all sorts of searches can cause your ads to be triggered that are somewhat Loosely related but of course your ads will also be shown to people that are searching for things like

cisters in London and and uh Search terms that are more closely related to that keyword next match type we've got is phrase match right so the way we do phrase match is we put the keyword in quotations so if we put in solicitors in London here and we put those quotation marks around them now phrase match Works a little bit differently so instead of broad match where it's like basically up to Google what we're saying to Google here with phrase match is look I want solicitors in London to be in the search term for my

ad to appear but I don't mind if you add things on before or after okay so with this keyword match type if we've entered that in solicitors in London as a phrase match our ads could appear for searches like the best solicitors in London or how to find a solicitor in London things either before or after the keyword then we've got another match type called exact match so if I go ahead and put that in now so we've got sisters in London in square brackets so we've got these in square brackets right sisters in London

the idea behind exact match is that our ads will only be shown to search terms that are very very closely related to what we've entered here so in this case it would be if someone searches for exactly solicitors in London or a very close variation so it might be solicitor in London or something really quite specific you might have something like solicitor in West London pop through in an exact match because it's only a slight variation so those are the three match types and that affects how the keyword works and which searches cause our ads

to be shown now Google wants us to go with broad match keywords and to be honest all three of those keyword match types they operate more broadly than you think they should even the definitions I've given Google will be flexible with the rules on on that let's say and the reason why they're doing that is part is because they believe it will help us as advertisers get better results because our ads get put in front of more people more potential prospects also Google is incentivized to do that because if our ads show up for more

searches more people going to click on our ads we therefore pay Google more and Google makes more money so there is some some incentive from Google there I think for beginners it's a good idea to ignore broad match to start with and stick to phrase an exact match because you have the Search terms that cause your ads to show are going to be more closely related to your keyword and you're less likely to therefore waste Budget on searches that are just not going to convert like we gave examples there of how to become a solicitor

in London or how many solicitors are there in London you don't want your ads to show for those searches because you want your ads to show for searches that are for people that are much more likely to actually be hiring or looking to hire a solicitor in London in this example so I think beginers should stick to phrase and exact match and you can always look to expand to Broad match later on but it's a really important component of keywords and how they operate is understanding this match types and how they work now in a

second I want to talk about negative keywords which is a whole different type of keyword but really important to Google ad campaigns before I do that I just want to quickly let you know about our done for you Google ad Services now if you're new to Google ads and you're going through this and you're thinking I thought keyword was a simple thing this seems to be really complicated and I'm actually about to to make it more complicated with negative keywords and you would just like someone else to do this for you get you great results

get you leads and sales that you want and not have to worry about this that's exactly what my company does so my agency can create manage and optimize Google ad campaigns for you we can take that workload off your hands almost certainly get you much better results and you'll be able to get yourself because we do this all day every day and have done for thousands of clients over many many years so if you're interested in that that sounds like a good deal then go ahead and click on the link in the video description below

that'll take you to a page on our website where you can book in a free course with one of my team members to find out more about our service how we might be able to help we may well have worked with business just like yours in the past and have a case study to share or two so if that sounds good go ahead and book that free call and hopefully we get a chance to work together okay so let's talk about negative keywords because these are really really important so negative keywords are again bits of

information you can give to Google where you are actively saying I don't want my ads to show up if someone includes this negative keyword in their search term and this is really important particularly if you're going to use broad match um keywords to have an extensive negative keyword list and be including lots of options that stop your ads from appearing for certain searches where you know that person is very unlikely to go ahead and become a customer of yours and putting ads in front of them especially if they click on it is just a complete

waste of money so you can add in negative keywords you can see you can do that under exclusion list under the shared Library over here on the left hand side and we've got this little box here where we can add in as many keyword words as we would like and I'd strongly recommend that Google advertisers do take a bit of time before they launch their campaign to think about words they would like to exclude and then they can also add in as they go along and take a look at the data and I'll show you

how to do that in a second so sticking with our solicitors in London keyword example and you would imagine a business targeting that keyword would be a solicitor in London right so sticking with that example what negative keywords might we want to enter to prevent our ads from being shown alongside those searches well things like jobs say someone's searching for solicitor job in London well we don't want our ad to show for that we are a solicitor maybe you are advertising to get employees in that case but if that's the case you want it to

be in a separate campaign if you're advertising for customers you don't want that you also don't want things like training or courses because that's the same sort of thing someone's looking to become a cista they're looking to learn if that's not what you offer you want to get rid of those you probably want to add in and just about every business wants to add in the word free into the negative keyword list cuz if someone's searching for free solicitor in London that might sound weird who would ever search for that I promise you there'd be

lots of people searching for that and they are very unlikely to be good quality customers and then you can add in the word free now not all businesses want to do that because some businesses actually are offering free things on the front end to get new customers so you wouldn't want to do it in that scenario but a lot of business want to add those in so you can have a little think about what do I want to put in here as negative keywords what do I not want my ads to show up for maybe

there are certain locations so you might operate in London but maybe you only operate in a part of London and you want to add in some locations that you don't operate in as negative keyword so if anyone searches for aista in East London then your ads won't show for those people but they will if they're in other locations if you know you're in West London for example and you know you're not willing to travel your customers aren't willing to travel so have a little think about that and add in some of the negative keywords before

you get started and then like I said you can go and add on other options as well I'm going to share to do that now so once your Google ad campaign is live and your ads are being served to people that are ser searching for things within Google you can see exactly which searches are causing your ads to be shown and you can actually look at the data by how many have generated clicks and conversions and things like that provided you've got conversion tracking set up and you can see that information in the search terms

report so if you just come up here and search in here for Search terms report I've actually got this prepped up on a separate tab to walk you through this so This Is The Search terms report for a campaign that we actually ran and this is what we call a branded search campaign so basically we were bidding on on keywords like my name the company's name it's it's around our brand because we want to make sure that those people come through to us as opposed to going elsewhere they're actively searching for us not something the

beginners need to worry about you can absolutely look to add this in later on once you've got a bit of a brand within within the industry and we set up this campaign right and we know what we're doing we've got our negative keywords we're using mostly exact match keywords in this case so there's not going to be many searches that cause our ads to be shown that we look at and go oh no that's a complete waste of money we don't want that um um to have been shown if you haven't got your negative keywords

list set out right if you are using phrase particularly broad match keywords you might be shocked what you see in your search Times report I object your honor it's one of the most important things particularly for new Google advertisers to do is to spend time going through the Search terms report having a look at the various options and things that have come up searches that caused your ads to be shown and then finding options and going I really don't want my ads to be shown for that that is a big waste of budget and getting

getting rid of those by adding in negative key so if I just scroll through here as an example you know we've got the top Heath media Ben Heath Heath media is in the name of my agency makes a lot of sense that that would come up Ben Heath's fine lead Guru is the name I agency used to have a few years ago some people still be searching for that benath agency benath marketing these are all absolutely fine Heath media reviews keep going down and we are eventually going to find some that we don't like and

I've already found one well I've found a couple as an example so here we've got Ben Heath newbry now I know because obviously we've looked around these search term and we keep an eye on those sort of stuff that there is a company called Ben Heath in newb that deals with Interiors that's what the company does so comp be completely different to what my business does and someone searching for Ben Heath Newbery is not searching for me even though that's my name obviously someone else has the same name they're not searching for me they're searching

for that business so in that case we would want to go back to our negative keyword list and add in the word newb in for this one right and we might want to add in the word Interiors as well if that's something that's that's coming up there'll be another example here we've got Ben Heath Vegas so is a professional poker player called Ben Heath and I'm pretty sure that whoever was searching for Ben Heath Vegas was looking for that Ben Heath not for me so again we would want to go back into our negative keyword

list and add in poker add in Vegas and therefore anyone searching for either one of those other businesses not related to me won't be shown our ads and neither of these Search terms have done much in the way of Impressions or clicks or anything like that and that's to be expected this is a branded search campaign so this is this is something that's really specific like I said if you go through this with a regular campaign you will see far more searches more frequently they're like that's not what we want to be advertising to those

people are not going to go on and become customers but I mean neither are these so we would want to go ahead and exclude them and this is how we do it so check in the search Times report regularly finding ones like this and then jumping back into your negative keyword list and being like right we want to add in Newber now we want to add in poker and Vegas and Interiors is what we found and then you'll find that over time a larger and larger percentage of the searches that cause your ads to be

shown will be ones that you're happy for your ads to be put in front of your combination of your keywords the match types you're using with your negative keyword list stopping bad searches from causing RADS to be shown will be working in conjunction and you end up with that sweet spot where the traffic you are putting your ads in front of and then bringing through to your website is quality and stuff that's likely to convert so now you understand what Google ads keywords are and why they're so important but there are lots of other elements

to Google ad campaigns that you need to get right if you want to see fantastic results because of that I'd recommend you check out this video in it I give you a full Google ads beginners tutorial I walk you through the entire process of creating a Google ad campaign from scratch and I show you all the various little elements that you need to get right like I said if you want to get great results so go ahead and give it a watch