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One of the most important things in search advertising or SEO in web development is keywords or search advertising keywords as it can summon prospective buyers to visit your website.  Because of making people visit your website is a crucial thing in online business, that is why many people attempt to create the right keywords for their advertisement. However, knowing bad keywords is as important as knowing the right keywords since it can prevent you from inadvertently ruining your campaign.  Here are characterizations of some bad keywords that you should watch out for.

1.)    Competitor Keywords 

Using competitor keywords in your website is not a wise thing, as competitor keywords may not be relevant with your website and moreover, it can consume your budget without giving any return on investment. As the keywords may be irrelevant to your website, generally competitor keywords charge a high cost per visit. Moreover, when the customer finds out that it is not you which they are looking for, they are not as likely to click your ad or contact you.

It is better to test the value of competitor’s keywords for your own campaign by creating a separate campaign with a separate budget to accurately track its performance. This allows you to track their return on investment without disturbing the results of original campaign in reaching target consumers. Once you complete this “split” testing, then you can better decide if you incorporate this into your advertising or you stay right away from it.

2.)    Generic Keywords

Using generic keywords means focusing on long tail keywords and localized keywords. For  example, the results would improve substantially if instead someone used specific , descriptive keyword such as “children’s doctor” instead of using only the word “doctor”, and your results may improve even further by adding geo-specific keywords, such as “Children’s doctor Melbourne”.  The use of generic keyword will help you maximize your search campaign.

3.)    Research-Related Keywords

Research-related Keywords is similar to generic terms, which can generate a lot of clicks without producing anything in return. The terms may look relevant; however, these types of keywords can devour your budget without producing new leads. Examples of research-related keywords are “bankruptcy law”, “lose weight fast”, and “foot pain treatment”.

4.)    High Spend Keywords

Find out what keywords from your campaign which produce results and which are just costing money. Remove keywords from you campaign that you have to spend a high percentage of your budget but doesn’t produce quality leads. To be able to find out the above suggestions, someone should carefully track conversion from campaign. This requires careful, regular reviews of keyword performance when you run your own search campaigns. By optimizing search campaign for conversions, people can make sure that they do not only get click but they really produces the result they want, which then convert into real sales, as long as those clicks don’t cost you more than the sale itself.

5.) Keywords that Don’t Drive Clicks

Check the CTR (click through rate) to find out if there is a good indication of relevancy of your keywords. If the keywords get a healthy number of customers clicking on your ads, that means they find it relevance to what they search for and if people are not clicking it, that means the opposite, people find that your keywords are not relevant with what they search for.

It’s important to maintain overall CTR as high as possible as CTR affects costs per click and ad position in the search results. So, removing keywords which produce low numbers of click can improve ad position while lowering average cost per click.

Moreover, evaluate keywords that generate a high volume of impression yet have a low CTR. Start with keywords with a CTR below 0.5%. As you eliminate, you can adjust to keywords with a CTR below 1%. However, someone could consider not eliminating a keywords even though it has only a few of click when it turns a lot of calls, emails, and forms and quality leads someone is getting when evaluating keyword effectiveness.