By Kirt Christensen There are times when a place is linked to a business. Let's say that you owned a casino, You may find that you can get more less expensive traffic bidding on "Niagara Falls" than just bidding on "Casino." Local business owners might the keywords applicable to their business and make the addition of your state and neighboring cities. Such as, a Cincinnati IT company could use this list, with the included suburb names and intentionally misspelled versions of "Cincinnati": Ohio computer consultant Cincinnati computer consultant Cincinati computer consultant Cincinatti computer consultant Tri-state computer consultant Tri state computer consultant Eaton computer consultant Jamestown computer consultant Miamisburg computer consultant Sidney computer consultant Troy computer consultant Milford computer consultant Loveland computer consultant Go to a map site and paste in a list of cities, then use an Excel spreadsheet to mix and match those terms. Use "computer consultant," "IT company," "IT consultant," etc. Having lots of keywords is the key to untapped markets, low bid prices, higher click through rates, and successful PPC management. Your effort in this will pay dividends. There is a secret to multiplying your keyword list by three as well as bidding on keywords overlooked by the competition. Quotes and brackets hide more surprises than you'd realize. Stephen Juth's tool AdWord Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com) helps you identify which of these variations will cost you less money and where there's less competition to fight through. While struggling through the daunting and frequently tiresome task of selecting a comprehensive keyword list, you may miss one or two singulars and plurals and leave out synonyms of your niche phrases. Google has already foreseen this problem and provides an extra feature, Expanded Phrase Matching, which adds singulars and plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms to your keyword list for you. Be cautious though, the service won't work on phrase matched or exactly matched keywords, only on the broad matched keywords on your list. Broad-Matched Keywords When you insert keywords at the time you're setting up your campaigns, these are the keywords that don't have any delimiters around them. For example: used cars Japanese used cars used cars for sale Be careful! By not providing a list of negative keywords associated with "used cars" you will end up with your ad showing on these searches: used cars german used cars used cars cleveland used police cars Your ad might even come up when someone searches this cockeyed phrase: cars used in filming dukes of hazzard Phrase Matches This term denotes keywords with quotation marks around them. Like these: "used cars" "Japanese used cars" "used cars for sale" The quotes will have your ads show up in searches that include these search terms in the order given, no other words inserted, like the words that follow: used cars old Japanese used cars used cars for sale chicago Your ad won't show for this search, however: used police cars Exact Matches These keywords are placed with square brackets around them. For example: [used cars] [Japanese used cars] [used cars for sale] With these keywords, only people who typed in these exact phrases, in this order, will see your ad. None of the following keyword searches will show your ad: used cars chicago german used cars old japanese used cars used cars for sale chicago used police cars With negative words included in your keyword, your page impression number will be fewer because your ads will show in a lesser number of searches. That will result in an automatic raising of your click-through-rate. This is the greatest part though: by lowering your page impressions by 20 percent, your click-through-rate actually is raised by 25 percent, not the expected 20 percent. Now check this out: If you cut unwanted impressions by 30 percent, your CTR will increase by 42 percent. If you cut unwanted impressions by 40 percent, your CTR will improve by 67 percent. If you cut unwanted impressions by 50 percent, your CTR will double. The use of negative keywords can really give your broad/phrase matching keywords a boost, but they won't change anything for your exact match keywords. By managing your pay-per-click well, the use of negatives can make a big difference.