Taking our keyword discussion forward, we will talk about two different kinds of keywords: LSI and negative keywords.

LSI keywords

LSI keyword stands for latent semantic indexing keywords. These keywords are also known as related keywords, but these keywords are used not for the ranking purpose, but to support the main keyword. For example: LSI keywords for sleeping mattress could be bed, bedroom, pillow, home furnishing, sleep, etc.

LSI keywords are used to build context for your main keywords to function. The logic behind using LSI keyword is this: Search engines assume, and rightly so, that if you are writing on sleeping mattresses then you will talk about sleeping, comfort, pillow, house furnishing, and related things because mattress is related to such things.

Therefore, a legit website that contains such terms can be associated more strongly with a mattress website than the keyword-rich page that talks about mattress, but has related LSI terms missing. This is done to separate wheat from chaff.

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are keyword phrases that you exclude from your list of keywords when building a strategy. Let’s say you are about to run a PPC campaign for your mattress business, and for that you have created a list of keywords that should trigger your PPC ad to appear.

Let’s say you have included words like spring mattress, sleeping mattress, etc., in your list, and decided that whenever a user search for any phrase that contains any of the above phrases your PPC ad should show. This way you hope to get some customers.

After 24 hours of running your campaign, you see that your ad got many clicks, but conversion rate remained zero. To investigate the reason, you see your account only to find that your ad got displayed even when people searched for sleeping mattress wallpaper, or spring mattress video.

You are obviously not targeting these keywords, as none of your buyers will search for terms like wallpaper and video. So, you want to configure your keyword targeting in such a way that your ad do not get displayed when keyword phrases contain these words. To accomplish this, you mark wallpaper and video as negative keywords.

Negative keywords are the keywords or keyword phrases which you do not want to target.