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Sometimes places are associated with businesses. For example, if you had a casino you might get additional cheaper traffic bidding on “Niagara Falls” than merely bidding on “Casino.”

For local businesses, take whatever keywords apply to your business and then add your state and as many close-by cities as possible. For example, a Cincinnati IT firm might use this list, which includes suburb names and deliberate misspellings 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

Using a map site cut and paste a list of the cities near you into an Excel spread sheet and mix up the terms with the cities. Use terms like: ‘computer consultant’, ‘IT company’, ‘IT consultant’ and so forth.

The passkey to untapped markets is to have loads of keywords. You will also find lowered bid prices, better CTR, and a successfully managed pay-per-click. The effort will pay off.

There’s a way you can multiply your keyword list threefold and at the same time bid on terms that your competitors are overlooking.

Quotes and brackets hide more surprises than you’d realize. Stephen Juth’s tool AdWord Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com) helps you identify which of these variations will cost you less money and where there’s less competition to fight through.

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

Keyword phrases that fall under this category are the ones that you use when setting up your campaign that don’t have any categorizing marks on them. Such as:

used cars

Japanese used cars

used cars for sale

Caution is also warranted at this point. If you do not use negative keyword phrases on “used cars” you will end up with your ad showing for these search phrases also:

used cars

german used cars

used cars cleveland

used police cars

Your ad might even come up when someone searches this cockeyed phrase:

cars used in filming dukes of hazzard

Phrase Matches

This term denotes keywords with quotation marks around them. Like these:

“used cars”

“Japanese used cars”

“used cars for sale”

These will make your ad show in searches that include these terms in this order, without extra words inserted, such as the following:

used cars

old Japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

Your ad won’t show for this search, however:

used police cars

Exact Matches

Place square brackets around your words to make exact matches. Such as:

[used cars]

[Japanese used cars]

[used cars for sale]

If you use exact match keywords then only those who search for your phrase exactly, will be shown your ad. These search phrases will not be shown your ad:

used cars chicago

german used cars

old japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

used police cars

By including negative keywords on your list, your total number of ad impressions will be fewer. This is caused by your ad being shown on fewer searches. In turn this causes your click through rate to raise. But Check out this math: If you lower your page impressions by 20 percent, then your click through rate will improve, not by 20 percent but by 25 percent. Here is some more:

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.

Negative keywords won’t affect the CTR of exact-matched keywords, but they will help your CTR on phrase- and broad-matched terms. If your PPC management is done right, there’s no way they can’t help.

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