The Engine Ready team has put together a valuable resource to help you quickly build your negative keyword list, by compiling a list of common terms, which in most cases can and should be used as negative keywords for most companies. We’ve provided the list in a .txt format, so you can easily copy and paste the listings into your Google, YSM and MSN accounts. You can download the list here.

You’ll want to review the list carefully before applying them to your campaigns. There may be some words on our list that are actually desirable for your business or may even describe your products or services.

We’ve broken out our list of 420 negative keywords by major vertical, along with a list of general negative keywords that should work well for any industry.

Since When Do Animals Write?

Along with our free negative keyword list, your web analytics are a prime source of negative keyword information. Here you can find the phrases your visitors searched on that led to a visit to your site. You can then determine which of these phrases are not related to your products and add them to your campaigns as negative keywords.

In a previous newsletter Wrong Keywords May Be Hazardous To Your Health, we described the example of a company that sold promotional logo pens that bid broad match on the term “pens” without any negative keywords.

By researching their analytics we found that they had received traffic for, and paid for phrases such as baby play pens, animal pens and dog pens.

By adding those words as negative keywords, we were able to prevent their ads from showing for products the company didn’t sell.

Click here to see more paths to Negative Nirvana >