Simple Steps for Building Your Negative Keyword List

If you’ve ever tried to create an effective SEO campaign, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time working on your keywords. Extensive research and proper usage of the right keywords can result in more clicks, higher conversion, and more traffic to your website. Plus, it can help you meet your business goals and bring you closer to your short and long term goals as well. This is why a good SEO Agency will put a significant amount of effort into creating a negative keywords list.

However, not a lot of people spend as much time, effort and energy building their negative keyword list. This is mostly because most people aren’t fully aware of how crucial a role negative keywords play in maximising the return on investment (ROI) and increasing the chances of your SEO campaign’s success. In fact, some research shows that almost half of the advertisers don’t add a single negative keyword to their content over the course of a month.

Basically, they’re missing out on a lot of potential to maximise the effectiveness of their overall PPC spend by not paying enough attention to their negative SEO list. So, if you’ve been making the same mistakes, read on to learn the basics about a negative keywords list and how to build one that effectively increases organic traffic to your site.

• Negative keywords help you avoid wasting ad spend on irrelevant search queries.
• Tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner and Search Terms Report are powerful for identifying negative keywords.
• Adding terms like “free,” “printable,” or unrelated keywords to your list can improve ROI and conversion rates.
• Being creative and proactive with search assist features and competitor research can uncover unexpected negative keywords.
• A thoughtful negative keyword list keeps your PPC campaigns focused, efficient, and aligned with your marketing goals.

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. What Are Negative Keywords?
3. Why Reaching the Right Audience Is Crucial
4. Maximise ROI with Smarter Targeting
5. How to Find Negative Keywords
   • Using Google Ads Keyword Planner
   • Using Search Term Reports
6. Get Creative with Your Negative Keywords
7. Use Search Assist to Discover Irrelevant Terms
8. Conduct Competitor Research
9. Why Choose TopRankings for SEO
10. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The goal of any SEO or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is to make your content as relevant as possible so it ranks higher on platforms like Google. Think of it like an auction: when you bid on the right keywords and create relevant content or ads, you’re more likely to appear in search results—and get your product in front of the right audience.

But what happens when your ad is shown to the wrong audience? That’s where things get costly. If you’re running a PPC campaign, you pay every time someone clicks your ad—even if they have no real interest in what you’re offering.

Let’s say you sell physical calendars. Naturally, you’d want to show up for searches like “calendar 2025,” “monthly calendars,” or even niche terms like “kittens calendar” or “mountain calendar.” These keywords are likely to attract users who are looking to buy what you’re selling.

However, you wouldn’t want your ad to appear for searches like “online calendar” or “printable calendar.” These terms are associated with free or digital options that don’t match your product offering. If users searching these terms click your ad, you’re wasting money without getting any return.

Negative keywords are terms you don’t want your ads to show up for. When you add these to your PPC campaign, you’re telling Google (or another platform) that these search queries aren’t relevant to your business.

For example, if you’re selling hard-copy wall calendars, you might want to exclude terms like:

• Online calendar
• Printable calendar
• Free calendar
• Mayan calendar
• Chinese calendar
• Gregorian calendar

Unless you sell those specific items, clicks from these searches won’t lead to conversions—and they’ll drain your ad budget.

Using a negative keyword list allows you to refine your targeting. This means your ads are more likely to appear in front of people genuinely interested in your product or service. You avoid paying for empty clicks, and your overall return on investment improves.

Negative keywords are a simple but powerful way to ensure your PPC campaign reaches the right audience, boosts conversions, and supports your broader marketing goals.

There are a lot of ways you can come up with a negative keywords list. While it requires some thought and effort, the process itself isn’t that difficult and taking the right steps can help you achieve your purpose more easily.

Similar to coming up with a list of keywords for your SEO campaign, you can make a list of negative keywords by simply examining actual user query data based on how people search online. Tools such as Google Ads Keyword Planner and Search Terms Report can be used for this purpose.

The main purpose of Google Ads Keyword Planner is to help you find the most effective keywords. These are the terms you can add to your content and ads to increase their reach.

Google doesn’t mind if you spend a few extra dollars on clicks—whether they lead to results or not. That’s why learning how to use this tool properly is essential. It can help you generate a list of negative keywords just as easily as relevant ones.

While Google may not give you a definitive list of negative keywords for your campaign, it can still offer helpful suggestions.

For example, when you search a term like “calendars,” Google shows you a list of related searches. It also provides data about their search volume and competition. Depending on your business niche, many of these terms might not apply to what you’re selling.

You may notice keywords that won’t attract real buyers—some of which we discussed earlier. When that happens, consider adding those irrelevant terms to your negative keyword list.

Once your website is up and running, Search Terms Report can show you actual search terms being typed by people who are clicking your links. Once you have a better idea about the type of search queries triggering your ads on search platforms, you can begin analysing the list and put together both negative and positive keyword lists. If done right, this method can yield some very powerful results.

You can start by sorting your Search Terms Report by the highest number of impressions. This provides you with a list of search queries that are more likely to trigger your ads on Google. Further on, this data can be refined to show which terms have higher click-through and rates of conversations. People don’t often realise what an eye-opener Search Terms Reports can be.

Terms you previously thought would yield impeccable results may not be performing as well, while other terms that you didn’t think would work might be generating the most traffic to your website. In case some terms aren’t working well to generate results, you may want to consider adding them to your negative keywords list. Even if they are related to your business, they are of no use if they aren’t bringing in results.

Most people can make things work by just following the above two steps to create a negative keywords list. However, if you really want your business to really rake in top results, it is a good idea to take things a little further. One thing that is most likely to pay in the long run is to get creative with your negative keywords. This concept can be a bit intimidating to most marketers to the extent that they may consider skipping it altogether. Don’t be that person. Take a little extra time to work on this and you’ll notice a huge advantage to your business.

The reason most people get intimidated by this step is that it requires a little more homework, and you can’t just use Google Ads Keyword Planner for this purpose. You need to put your mind to it. For instance, think about someone searching up “calendar girls” and ending up on your calendar website. Chances are slim that they are actually looking for calendars with kittens or scenery, or that they are looking for calendars at all. They’re likely looking for the 2003 British movie with the same name, the comedy drama from 1993 featuring Jason Priestly, or even that song by Neil Sedaka all the way back from 1961.

Either way, you are not likely to get a potential visitor to your site, but you may end up wasting some money on PPC, just because the person looking up a song from 1961 was bored. Adding “calendar girls” to your negative keywords list can be a good step in this case.

Another very effective tool people tend to overlook is the search assist feature. You know how you type a single letter on Google or any other online search platform and it instantly drops down a menu of the most relevant searches from that letter? As you continue typing, it continues to update the relevant searches without wasting any time. Using this feature in any search engine can be very telling.

As you type the more common keywords related to your product or service, it will instantly start spitting out suggestions of more relevant keywords. An effective method to find the most common negative keywords to your service is to enter your highest traffic keywords into search engines and see what suggestions are being shown. If any of these suggestions are irrelevant to your business, add them to your negative keyword lists.

Doing competitive research on Google is another excellent way of discovering more negative keywords. Just perform a google search of your primary keywords and analyse the results. Are there any results that aren’t relevant to your business on the first couple of pages? Add them to your negative keywords list. Any terms and phrases that don’t seem transactional should also be added to your negative keywords list.

However, make sure to be smart while following this process. Don’t mindlessly add any result that you feel is irrelevant to your business without thinking about it. Create a list of negative keywords and then go over it again to make sure that you haven’t accidentally added anything that might potentially generate results. Always analyse the situation and put your thought into it while working on your keywords.

While there are many steps that you can take to create an effective SEO campaign, you don’t always need to do it yourself – not when there are people out there who can work around the clock to create an effective strategy while you focus on your business.

At TopRankings, we offer our clients the best SEO services in the market. We help you build a strong online presence that will help your website rank higher on search platforms and increase your business. Unlike most other services that make false promises, our SEO agency will work with you while mutually agreeing on targets that will give your trackable results. Remember, your success is our success. So, we won’t be satisfied until your goals are met.

Contact us so we can work with you to create an effective SEO campaign for your business. 

1. What is a negative keyword?

A negative keyword is a term or phrase that prevents your ad from showing up in search results that are not relevant to your business. For example, if you sell printed calendars, adding “online calendar” as a negative keyword ensures your ad won’t show up for users looking for digital versions.

2. Why are negative keywords important in PPC?

Negative keywords help reduce wasted spend on irrelevant traffic. They ensure your ads are shown only to users genuinely interested in your products or services, which increases click-through rate (CTR) and return on investment (ROI).

3. How often should I update my negative keyword list?

Regularly. It’s a good practice to review your search terms report weekly or monthly. This helps you adapt to changes in user behaviour and improve campaign targeting over time.

4. Can negative keywords hurt my campaign?

Yes—if used incorrectly. Adding overly broad or wrongly assumed negative terms can accidentally block relevant traffic. Always review your list to ensure you’re not excluding high-potential search queries.

5. Can SEO agencies help with negative keyword management?

Absolutely. Agencies like TopRankings have experience using advanced tools and data insights to fine-tune keyword strategies, including crafting effective negative keyword lists tailored to your business goals.