Keyword Scrubbing

With all the keyword tools out there, it’s very easy to generate a huge keyword list in a short amount of time. By the time you grab all the short terms, long tail phrases, an every possible permutation of buy words, geo terms, and mis-spelling errors, your list can be totally unmanageable in size. So the first step I always do when I am building out a new campaign is to scrub down my keyword list.

Scrubbing the list is basically removing any non converting keywords from your list, before inserting them in your campaign. Negative keywords are great, but not having the keywords in your account to being with is even better. What I do is first gather all possible keywords from every source I can find. Keyword Discovery is my first tool of choice, but I also use all the free tools from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others to make sure I have grabbed every possible word. I place them all into my keyword slicing/dicing program. (Sorry I can’t provide a link, I searched all over for a good one and never found it, so I had a program coded based on what I needed).

Here are some examples of things I scrub out:

1. Dupes. First thing is to remove all duplicates from the master list.
2. 50 characters and longer are deleted. I have never had terms this long convert well enough to keep them in my campaigns, so I axe them at the start.
3. I run a number search, 1-9 on the list. Often these are really bad keywords, like people typing their account numbers or phone numbers into the search field. Odds are they will never be searched on again.
4. Profanity/sexual terms. Most PPC providers will decline these, so best to remove them yourself.
5. Spam terms. I have a whole list of the common spammy terms people append on to common search terms. I don’t want those on my final clean list.
6. GEO terms. If you are running a US based offers, you want to scrub all other country related terms from your list. I remove all terms relating to the non-converting countries, and cities in those countries.

These are just a few examples of things I scrub. The more you can scrub your master keyword list before beginning to build your campaigns, the less work it is for you down the road. Plus your campaign will have an overall better quality score. Remember, we are all working with essentially the same keywords, it’s how you use them, and don’t use them that will make you successful.