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

Use a mapping site to compile a list of nearby cities and paste that into an Excel spread-sheet. Using term like 'computer consultant', 'IT company', 'IT consultant' you can mix and match it with the cities and towns for a great addition to your keyword list.

With a lot of keywords you have the keys to untapped markets, lower bid prices, higher CTR, and success as a PPC manager. Effort put forth here will pay you back many times over.

There's a way you can multiply your keyword list threefold and at the same time bid on terms that your competitors are overlooking.

To really maximize your base keyword list use brackets and quotes. In his tool AdWords Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com), Stephen Juth helps identify variations that are less pricey and for which there is less competition.

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.

There is an additional feature that Google provides that can help you with that difficulty, Expanded Phrase Matching adds singulars, plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms where they may be lacking in your keyword list.

Care is warranted here. This feature works for your broad matched keywords, not for your exact matches and phrase matching on your list of phrases.

Broad-Matched Keywords

Keyword phrases that fall under this category are the ones that you use when setting up your campaign that don't have any categorizing marks on them. Such as:

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

It may even show your ad for this wonky search:

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

Place square brackets around your words to make exact matches. Such as:

[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

By including negative keywords on your list, your total number of ad impressions will be fewer. This is caused by your ad being shown on fewer searches. In turn this causes your click through rate to raise. But Check out this math: If you lower your page impressions by 20 percent, then your click through rate will improve, not by 20 percent but by 25 percent. Here is some more:

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.

Negative keywords won't affect the CTR of exact-matched keywords, but they will help your CTR on phrase- and broad-matched terms. If your PPC management is done right, there's no way they can't help.