Today’s short article is going be a quick tip on, as you may have already guessed from the title, how to properly manage an exact match type keyword list.

This sounds like a no brainer, doesn’t it?

Actually, it usually is a no brainer especially when you are creating your keyword list from scratch and having exact match keywords is as easy as…duh…setting the keyword match type as exact. But many times, we create exact match type keywords by picking out specific search queries that perform exceptionally well compare to other search queries that are triggered by a phrase or broad match type keywords. Adding these well performed search queries as separate exact match type keywords allows us to manage their bids more efficiently and we can even create targeted ads that are specially catered for them.

For example, let’s say I have this keyword “electric guitar” in phrase match as one of my keywords in my Electric Guitar ad group. When I pulled the search query report, I discovered that four search queries had triggered my keyword. They are:

* electric guitar lessons
* buy electric guitar
* electric guitar for sale
* electric guitar bags

Out of these for search queries, I then realized that the search query “buy electric guitar” gives me the most conversions and has much better ROI compares to the others but is at a lower than optimal position on the Google SERP. The logical thing to do is to raise the bid to get more clicks, right?

Well, the search queries are all tied to one single keyword, I can’t really raise the position of one search query without raising the others, so what I can do here is to add a new exact match type keyword “buy electric guitar” to a new ad group, let’s call the ad group Buy Electrical Guitar.

Most people would just stop here and call it a day, but that’s not all!

After creating the new keyword and ad group, now I have two keywords that can be potentially triggered when someone searches for buy electric guitar – “electric guitar” in phrase match and [buy electric guitar] in exact match.

How do I know which keyword will be triggered?

Well, I can’t and Google doesn’t give a clear answer for this kind of situation. So, the best solution to this is to add the negative exact match type keyword [buy electric guitar] to the ad group Electric Guitar. This way, when someone searches for buy electric guitar, only the exact match keyword will be triggered and the phrase match keyword will be blocked by the negative keyword.

Doing this allows you to have precise control over which keyword you want to be triggered, and isn’t the whole purpose of adding exact match type keywords to have more control.

Traian Neacsu has almost a decade experience in SEO and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, a Internet Marketing services based company that provides SEO Vancouver to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit http://www.pitstopmedia.com