Due to the increase in unemployment I have seen an increasing trend in customers accounts. Although many of my clients are not hiring they are receiving traffic from people desperately looking for employment. It seems that this desperation had taken people from searching employment sites such as Monster, Career Builder, etc. to pounding the internet pavement going ”door to door” or “website to website” so to speak. If you are not hiring then it is necessary to add negative keywords to your ad groups to prevent your ads from appearing when people are looking for employment.
Say you are a plumber using broad or phrase match keywords. Your broad match keyword ’plumber’ can allow your ads to appear for ‘plumber jobs’. Your phrase match “Las Vegas plumber” can allow your ads to appear for “Las Vegas plumber jobs”.
To avoid appearing to people looking for jobs add keywords such as -job, -jobs, -employment, -career, -careers. Simply adding a – before a keyword makes it negative. Why pay for people to visit your website looking for employment?
Refer to the following sources for info to identify negative keywords to add to your account.
- search query performance report
- web server logs
- Google Analytics
While the negative keywords will help combat the queries that include ‘jobs’, ‘career’, etc you may still receive traffic from people looking for ‘plumber companies’ without including the keyword job, career, etc. If you still are receiving inquiries for employment then I suggest adding some text to your ads to let people know you are not hiring such as: not hiring, no employment opportunities, no jobs available, etc.
