If I could teach every home service owner one thing to check in their own Google Ads account, it might be this. Negative keywords are simple, they cost nothing to add, and they’re often the fastest way to stop paying for clicks that were never going to become jobs.
Here’s what they are, how to find the searches that need them, and the short list I’d start with in almost any contractor account.
What a negative keyword actually does
When you add a keyword to Google Ads, you’re telling Google which searches you’d like to show up for. A negative keyword does the opposite. It tells Google which searches you never want to appear on, no matter how closely they match your other keywords.
This matters more than it used to. Google has steadily loosened how closely a search has to match your keyword before your ad can show. Broad match is now the default in many campaigns, and it’s designed to find more searches, not fewer. That’s useful for reach, but it also means your foundation repair ad can show for someone searching for foundation repair jobs, a foundation makeup brand, or a how-to video. Nothing in the interface flags those searches for you. You have to go look.
Where to find the wasted searches
The report you want is called Search terms. It shows the actual words people typed before they clicked your ad, which is different from the keywords you chose.
- Sign in to Google Ads and click Campaigns in the left menu.
- Open Insights and reports, then Search terms.
- Set the date range to the last 30 or 90 days.
- Sort by Cost, highest first, so the expensive searches rise to the top.
Now read down the list and ask one question about each line: could this person have hired me? If the answer is clearly no, that search is a candidate for a negative keyword. You can tick the box next to it and choose Add as negative keyword right from that screen.
Don’t worry about every tiny search with one click. Focus on the ones that have spent real money, and on patterns that show up again and again.
The negatives most contractor accounts need
Every business is a little different, but these themes show up in nearly every home service account I look at.
- Job seekers: jobs, careers, hiring, employment, apprenticeship, resume.
- Do-it-yourself research: DIY, how to, tutorial, video, YouTube, kit.
- Training and licensing: course, class, school, certification, license exam.
- Supplies and retail: supplies, wholesale, rental, plus big-box store names if people search for products rather than service.
- Wrong service or wrong meaning: words that share your trade name but mean something else. A crawl space company might see searches about crawl space games or pets. A foundation company might see makeup searches.
- Areas you don’t serve: city or county names outside your service area that keep appearing.
One caution. Be careful with words that sound low intent but aren’t. Searches with cost, price or near me in them are often from people getting ready to hire. I’d leave those alone unless the search terms report shows they never turn into leads.
A quick example of what this is worth
Let’s say you spend $3,000 a month on Google Ads, and when you sort the search terms report you find that about 15 percent of the spend went to job seekers, DIY searches and towns you don’t cover. That’s around $450 a month, or about $5,400 a year, going to clicks that couldn’t become customers.
Adding negatives doesn’t make that money disappear. Google will usually spend it on other searches. But now it’s going to searches that can actually turn into jobs, which tends to lower your cost per lead without raising your budget. If you want to see how that flows through to the number that really matters, I walk through it in cost per lead vs cost per booked job.
Match types for negatives, in plain terms
Negative keywords work a little differently from regular keywords, and this trips people up.
- Negative broad match blocks any search that contains all of your words, in any order. It does not block misspellings or close variations, so you may need to add those separately.
- Negative phrase match blocks searches that contain your words in that exact order.
- Negative exact match blocks only that exact search and nothing else.
For most owners, single words like jobs or DIY added as broad negatives cover the bulk of the waste. Save phrase and exact for cases where a word is fine on its own but a specific combination isn’t.
Use a shared list so you only do it once
If you run more than one campaign, put your common negatives in a shared list instead of adding them campaign by campaign. In Google Ads, go to Tools, then Shared library, and look for Exclusion lists or Negative keyword lists, depending on how your account displays it. Create a list, add your words, then apply it to each campaign. New campaigns can pick it up in a couple of clicks.
If you’re on Performance Max, including the pay-per-lead setup replacing Local Services Ads, negatives work a bit differently and the options have been expanding. It’s worth checking what your account allows today. I cover the budget side of that campaign type in how to set your budget on Performance Max pay-per-lead.
How often to check
For a new campaign, I’d look at the search terms report every week for the first month. After that, once a month is usually plenty. Put it on the calendar next to whatever else you review monthly. It takes about fifteen minutes once you’ve done it a couple of times.
And if you’d rather have someone look over the account with you the first time, that’s exactly the kind of thing I like to teach. Reading your own search terms report is one of the skills that makes every conversation with your agency easier. You can request a free audit here, and I’ll show you where the biggest wasted searches are in your own account.