5 Simple Google AdWords Tweaks You Can Make Right Now

Author: Guy Sheetrit Updated Date: March 7, 2026 Category: Advanced SEO Techniques , Online marketing , SEO Basics

Refining and updating your SEO techniques is the name of the game if you want to stay competitive.

Today we’ll go over five Google AdWords tweaks you can use to optimize your campaigns. These are by no means outlandish advanced techniques. They are instead helpful tips on the basics to ensure that you aren’t making any elementary mistakes. Avoid actions that might get in the way of reaching that all-important goal of page one on SERPs. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Eight Reasons SEO Might.

Google AdWords can be a challenging thing to set up. In addition to the million other tasks, an SEO needs to stay on top of it’s critical to keep a close eye on your keyword match types and quality scores. Working on these subjects can be particular stress for somebody new to the scene. These five points of advice will help you stay true and give you some peace of mind at the same time!

For more technical SEO insights, explore our Core Web Vitals checklist and SEO fundamentals guide.

It’s worth taking a look at these points even if you are an experienced and well-established SEO. Spending a few minutes going through these might just give you an insight you may have missed. Often, your techniques can be very unique to you. This means different perspectives can have great value.

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Work on your structure

As with any platform that works on bids you have to expect a large amount of maintenance to keep your efforts effective.

Lack of this can cause wasted expenditure and can jeopardize the results you might get from your invested budget. Nowadays, AdWords forms a large part of a daily marketing operation for most companies. Consequently, it’s very much worth it to make things as simple as humanly possible. This greatly helps free up your valuable time. It also makes it both easier to navigate and more likely to produce good results.

Best practices for your online account tend to have to do with the structure of your Google Adwords campaign. You need to ensure that your ad group hierarchy makes sense. It is not good if it ends up being a tangled nightmare to navigate through. As keywords and campaigns can change fluidly and rapidly your daily monitoring needs to be as close to cranking a widget as possible. You don’t need the stress of trying to piece together what is on your screen. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on White Hat SEO Black.

A sensible way to do this is to group your campaigns together around themes that are key to your business. It makes it easier and more intuitive to work with.

Further to this, you can also try methods like creating ad groups for each type of keyword you make use of, while still having the same keywords within these groups. This is a handy trick, as it will let you get a very macro-level understanding of your performance metrics while still grouping together your keywords into themes. This has the added bonus of helping increase your quality scores – win-win.

Be wary of broad match keywords

This is of key importance to a service that is tied down geographically such as storefronts or limited delivery items.

The default setting you will be given is for your ads to appear to users who are physically within the area. and also for users who are searching for that specific area.

This means that it’s quite uncommon in reality to find a customer who is searching for a specific town within an area while they are located elsewhere. The workaround for this one is to make sure that you alter your default settings to have the option “people in targeted location”.

This means that can better tailor your investment towards those customers located in the area that your service can cover.

It might sound like you would lose out on potential customers this way, but the fact of the matter is that your bottleneck is your budget and not the customers.

They are out there and the most important factor in your Google AdWords success is to target them as best as you can.

Make sure your negative keywords are updated

It’s easy to forget some of the many tasks to do with Adwords. A good tip is that once you have impressions coming in for your keywords you will have data available on the types of search queries that triggered your chosen ads in the first place.

What this means is that you can then identify themes of some keywords and add them as negative keywords.

This means that you will cut down on wasted budget and also help increase your quality score – clicks will go up and this improves your relevancy. That’s a big deal when it comes to the algorithm that governs quality.

Avoid “search network with display select”

You of course have two key options when it comes to the type of campaign. This is the search network only and the other search network with display select.

It’s a common enough occurrence that beginners in Google AdWords management will go for the second option. This is because it means the ads will be provided to a wider audience than the former option and your ads will populate a greater number of banner spaces. This sounds really good on paper, but it is more complicated than that. In fact, you will be running an ineffective AdWords campaign if you make use of this option.

Similar to the point we discussed above, the key is to reduce the number of non-targeted ads as much as you possibly can. Having a broad throw-out of your paid-for ads won’t be getting the high conversion and relevancy you really need.

The point is, that a larger audience is not always a desirable thing when it comes to Google AdWords. You can only hope to work on your targeting. Once your quality score hits a high point then you can think of expanding your budget. The exception here is if you have a large budget to throw around and need short-term results. That might work but isn’t an artful way of working by any means.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is this guide about?

This comprehensive guide provides strategies and best practices for achieving success. Following these approaches can help improve your results and competitive advantage.

Q: How long does it take to see results?

Results vary. Most strategies require 3-6 months before significant improvements. Ongoing optimization and consistency are essential for sustainable success.

Q: Do I need professional help?

While basic implementation can be done independently, professional guidance often accelerates results and helps avoid costly mistakes.

Q: What are the most important factors for success?

Key factors include thorough research, consistent execution, quality over quantity, regular performance monitoring, and adapting to industry changes.

Q: How do I measure success?

Track KPIs like traffic, conversions, revenue, and engagement rates. Regular analysis helps identify areas for improvement.

Q: What channels should I focus on?

Most businesses benefit from SEO, content marketing, social media, and paid advertising. Start where your target audience is most active.

For a deeper dive, explore our guide on SEO Ranking Factors Important.

The Evolution of Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing has transformed dramatically over the past decade, evolving from simple banner advertisements to sophisticated, data-driven strategies that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning. Understanding this evolution provides context for developing effective modern marketing strategies that resonate with today’s consumers.

Modern digital marketing requires integrated approaches combining multiple channels into cohesive customer experiences. The most successful businesses recognize that consumers interact with brands through complex journeys spanning multiple devices and platforms.

Content Marketing Best Practices

Content remains the foundation of successful digital marketing, serving as the primary mechanism for attracting organic traffic, building brand authority, and engaging target audiences. Effective content addresses specific search queries while providing genuine value to readers through comprehensive answers and actionable insights.

Data-Driven Marketing Decisions

Modern marketing success depends on sophisticated analytics enabling data-driven decisions. Understanding which metrics connect to business outcomes allows continuous optimization and improved return on investment through testing and iterative improvement.

Building Brand Authority

Establishing thought leadership provides significant competitive advantages including increased brand awareness and customer trust. Effective thought leadership addresses emerging trends, challenges conventional wisdom, and provides actionable guidance.

Maximizing Marketing ROI

Proving marketing ROI requires clear objectives, sophisticated tracking, and continuous optimization. The most successful marketing organizations treat marketing as an investment delivering measurable returns through continuous testing.

Learn More: Home

Technical SEO in 2025: The Foundation That Determines Your Ceiling

Technical SEO is the least glamorous discipline in the search marketing stack — and the most consequential. You can have the best content, the most authoritative backlinks, and the strongest brand signals in your niche, but if Googlebot can’t efficiently crawl and index your site, or if your Core Web Vitals scores are in the bottom quartile, those assets are being systematically undervalued.

The technical SEO landscape in 2025 has expanded significantly. Where technical SEO once meant XML sitemaps and robots.txt management, it now encompasses JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data, site architecture, and increasingly, AI-readiness signals like entity markup and knowledge graph integration.

Core Web Vitals: The Performance Metrics That Directly Impact Rankings

Google’s Core Web Vitals became an official ranking signal in 2021 and have been progressively weighted more heavily since. The three metrics and what they actually measure:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly does the main content of a page load? Target: under 2.5 seconds. The most common LCP killers are unoptimized hero images, render-blocking JavaScript, and slow server response times. Fix priority: compress and convert images to WebP, implement lazy loading for below-fold images, and enable browser caching.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly does the page respond to user interactions (clicks, taps, keyboard input)? This replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. Target: under 200ms. INP problems are almost always JavaScript-related — heavy third-party scripts, main thread blocking, or inefficient event handlers.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much does the page layout shift as it loads? Target: under 0.1. Common causes are images without defined dimensions, dynamically injected content (ads, banners, cookie notices), and web fonts loading after text is rendered.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides field data (real user measurements from Chrome users) that is the actual data used in rankings — not the lab data from manual tests. Optimize for field data improvement, not just lab score improvement.

Crawl Budget Optimization

Crawl budget — how many pages Googlebot crawls on your site per day — is finite and valuable. Wasting it on low-value pages means high-value pages get crawled less frequently. Crawl budget optimization is critical for sites with 10,000+ pages.

Pages that consume crawl budget without adding value:

Faceted navigation duplicates (color/size/price filters creating unique URLs)
Paginated archives beyond page 2-3
Tag and author archive pages on CMS platforms
Session ID URLs and UTM parameter variations
Staging or development URLs accidentally accessible to crawlers

Management approach: use robots.txt to block parameter-based duplication, implement canonical tags on near-duplicate pages, and configure the URL Parameter tool in Google Search Console to indicate which parameters change page content versus just tracking parameters.

JavaScript SEO: The Invisible Technical Barrier

Over 70% of websites now use JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, Next.js) for their front-end. JavaScript SEO is the discipline of ensuring these frameworks don’t create rendering barriers for Googlebot.

Googlebot renders JavaScript, but with significant caveats: rendering happens in a second-wave queue (hours to days after initial crawl), JavaScript errors can prevent content from rendering entirely, and complex client-side routing can prevent proper canonicalization.

The safest architecture for SEO: Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG) for all content that needs to rank. Dynamic content (personalization, user-specific data) can be client-side. This hybrid approach gives you the performance and SEO benefits of server rendering without sacrificing the interactivity of modern JavaScript frameworks.

By Guy Sheetrit
Sep 16, 2016

5 Simple Google AdWords Tweaks You Can Make Right Now

Work on your structure

Be wary of broad match keywords

Make sure your negative keywords are updated

Avoid “search network with display select”