There are times when a place is linked to a business. Let’s say that you owned a casino, You may find that you can get more less expensive traffic bidding on “Niagara Falls” than just bidding on “Casino.”

Local business owners might the keywords applicable to their business and make the addition of your state and neighboring cities. Such as, a Cincinnati IT company could use this list, with the included suburb names and intentionally misspelled versions of “Cincinnati”:

Ohio computer consultant

Cincinnati computer consultant

Cincinati computer consultant

Cincinatti computer consultant

Tri-state computer consultant

Tri state computer consultant

Eaton computer consultant

Jamestown computer consultant

Miamisburg computer consultant

Sidney computer consultant

Troy computer consultant

Milford computer consultant

Loveland computer consultant

Go to a map site and paste in a list of cities, then use an Excel spreadsheet to mix and match those terms. Use “computer consultant,” “IT company,” “IT consultant,” etc.

With a lot of keywords you have the keys to untapped markets, lower bid prices, higher CTR, and success as a PPC manager. Effort put forth here will pay you back many times over.

There is a secret to multiplying your keyword list by three as well as bidding on keywords overlooked by the competition.

There is more inside quotes and brackets than words. The tool AdWord Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com)by Stephen Juth will help with the identification of the variants that cost you less and have less competition fighting for them.

Creating a comprehensive list of keywords can be a tiresome labor of love and it may be a temptation to leave out a singular or plural or overlook the synonyms that may be related to one or more of your niche keywords.

There is an additional feature that Google provides that can help you with that difficulty, Expanded Phrase Matching adds singulars, plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms where they may be lacking in your keyword list.

Care is warranted here. This feature works for your broad matched keywords, not for your exact matches and phrase matching on your list of phrases.

Broad-Matched Keywords

When you insert keywords at the time you’re setting up your campaigns, these are the keywords that don’t have any delimiters around them. For example:

used cars

Japanese used cars

used cars for sale

Be careful! By not providing a list of negative keywords associated with “used cars” you will end up with your ad showing on these searches:

used cars

german used cars

used cars cleveland

used police cars

Your ad may well show up when someone searches using this wacky phrase:

cars used in filming dukes of hazzard

Phrase Matches

Keywords with quote marks on them fall under this category. Such as:

“used cars”

“Japanese used cars”

“used cars for sale”

Having quotes on your keywords will have your ad showing up when searches are done on these search terms in this order with no other words filled in, as shown in this list:

used cars

old Japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

But for this search your ad won’t be shown:

used police cars

Exact Matches

These keywords are placed with square brackets around them. For example:

[used cars]

[Japanese used cars]

[used cars for sale]

With these keywords, only people who typed in these exact phrases, in this order, will see your ad. None of the following keyword searches will show your ad:

used cars chicago

german used cars

old japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

used police cars

With negative words included in your keyword, your page impression number will be fewer because your ads will show in a lesser number of searches. That will result in an automatic raising of your click-through-rate. This is the greatest part though: by lowering your page impressions by 20 percent, your click-through-rate actually is raised by 25 percent, not the expected 20 percent. Now check this out:

If you cut unwanted impressions by 30 percent, your CTR will increase by 42 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 40 percent, your CTR will improve by 67 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 50 percent, your CTR will double.

The use of negative keywords can really give your broad/phrase matching keywords a boost, but they won’t change anything for your exact match keywords. By managing your pay-per-click well, the use of negatives can make a big difference.