If you’ve been around Rothman PPC for very long, you’ve undoubtedly heard us harp on the importance of search terms and adding negative keywords. But if all you’ve ever seen are bad search term reports, perhaps you’ve never had a chance to see what a good search terms report could actually look like. What is the potential here?
Well, now is your chance to check out the potential. Here are two days worth of search terms of an actual moving company account that came to us, before we overhauled the account. Zip codes, city names and competitor names have been changed to protect the innocent, but besides that, these reflect real search terms & representative quality ratios from our actual search term reports. Green means a good search term, red means a bad search term, and yellow means it could be a good search term depending on the services the moving company offers.
So, here is a real moving company’s search term report, pre-Rothman PPC:
moving companies
local movers
cost to move a tree in carver county mn
moving company from canada to usa
matt’s moving bloomington
mover
local movers 55401
st paul mn to bloomington mn move company
top commercial relocation minneapolis area
college muscle movers
furniture moving sliders
moving companies near 55404
movers company dakota county st paul mn
2 men a truck moving company
truck rental with driver
college muscle moving
craigslist movers
matts moving com
hennepin county mn local movers
cheap piano movers
yelp movers
moving and storage companies in orange county ca
local movers needed
hire a mover near me
u haul truck minneapolis mn
cheapest movers in mn
minneapolis mn packing and moving cheap
hennepin county move out cleaning
Gross, right? So here we have 16 bad search terms and 12 good ones. After we crunched the numbers, we saw that of the $387.08 spent, only 39%, or $152.30, was spent on solid, relevant searches. At Rothman PPC we exclude all “cheap” searches since someone searching for “cheapest movers near me” is price-sensitive and will be much more likely to reject your reasonably priced services. We also exclude all competitors, since in our experience, advertising on competitors generally results in clicks but no conversions. Based on this evaluative criteria, $234.78, or 61% of the budget was wasted on related but not relevant searches.
Is there a better way? Here at Rothman PPC, we have mastered the art of adding negative keywords and using match types to provide the most precise possible targeting. When the above client came to us a while back, we completely overhauled the account and added hundreds of negative keywords. Then we set it live and gathered 2 days worth of new search results.
Here are the search terms we got clicks from over our first two days. The results speak for themselves.
moving services near me
movers company in minneapolis
movers in mn
moving company in bloomington
college muscle moving bloomington mn
moving services near me
moving company near me
local movers near me
local movers in st paul mn
local movers st paul minnesota
local moving companies
movers eau claire mn
movers duluth mn
movers in st paul minnesota
moving companies near st paul mn
moving companies in bloomington mn
moving packers minneapolis
minneapolis flat rate movers
companies moving from minneapolis to puerto rico
moving from minneapolis to paris need transport company
hourly movers minneapolis
moving services in bloomington
pool table movers hennepin county
best local movers st paul mn
movers duluth mn
mover from duluth to minneapolis
st paul moving company
The quality, relevant searches have increased from 39% to 80% – a 105% improvement. We also slashed the bad spend from 61% of the budget down to 18%.
Not only that, but we search through the account every single week adding negative keywords, refining search results. A few bad search terms inevitably sneak through on even the finest of accounts, so we hunt them down and add them as negatives every single week. So we are continually improving, refining and fine-tuning until we rarely have to add a negative on that account. In this case, we will add “college”, “muscle”, “flat rate”, “paris” and “puerto rico” as negatives, since this particular company does not do international moves – making next week’s search results even better.
The yellow results on this set of search results are the type of searches that can be either relevant or irrelevant, based on your individual business. For the purposes of this example, we counted the yellow search results as bad spend, but your individual business may find these search terms to be exactly what you want.
This is where knowing your business inside and out becomes critical. Do you conduct international moves? Do you move pool tables? If so, then the yellow search terms here are fine.
The rule of thumb is, either target it or block it. Target whatever services you offer in your ad copy and your website. If I am a customer searching for international movers and your website is silent on the subject, I will assume that you don’t do international moves. The same thing goes for pool tables, pianos, apartment moves, etc.
For instance, if you do pool table moves but you don’t target pool tables specifically in your ad copy or on your website, then a pool table moving search is as good as wasted because the customer will more than likely just move on to the next search listing looking for a company more equipped to meet their needs.
So if you do pool table moves, target those searches – specifically say so in your ad copy and your website information. But if you don’t do these types of moves, don’t spend money on clicks you don’t want. Add the words “pool table” and “pool” as negative keywords and never look back.
In Conclusion
You CAN improve your traffic quality, cut wasted budget, and increase your ROI! But it takes diligence, precision, and lots and lots of negative keywords, along with quality targeting and good match types.
Do you want your search terms report to look this good, but you just don’t have the time and energy to manage your account every week? Get in touch. We would love to give you a hand and help you succeed.
