Campaign-Negative Keywords

Chances are unless you were referred to us by a current client of ours, you went to Google and typed in something like “Sarasota Massage”. We came up either on the side or on top as a paid listing and somewhere on the first two pages as a regular listing. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately while Google is one of our best tools for allowing potential clients to find us it is also sometimes misleading.

We use what are called “campaign negative keywords”. Basically we took all the potentially misleading terms that could be paired with massage and made sure that if the user searched for those terms we wouldn’t come up.

Why is this important?

We’re a legitimate family-owned business and offer only legal and ethical services within our scope of practice. Unfortunately illicit services often use “massage” as a cover for their “extras” and it can be confusing to the person trying to find those services as to who actually offers them.

Because a series of keywords has developed that are often used to hint that these services are available, they’ve become associated with the search engines. Type in the word massage and one of the other key words and you may end up with contact numbers for these shady offerings. Or, you may end up on a therapist’s website that accidentally used one of them on their pages.

This is a problem because as the “code words” become more and more creative, it’s more likely that a legitimate service is going to come up under them. Recently I learned, for example, that “alternative” is now being paired with the word massage and men get the idea that these services are available. Now, because I want us to be searchable under “alternative health” or “alternative pain relief” I’m not going to turn the world alternative into a campaign negative keyword.

See my problem? That’s just one of the many words that are being used. I had hoped that our proclamation that we only offer legitimate services (on the first page of our website, no less!) would make these characters go somewhere else, but I still get the occasional phone call or email asking if we include those items in our offerings.

This is just a little blog update because it’s been on my mind lately and I know that some search engine referrals do end up reading this blog prior to booking an appointment.