Negative Keywords Are the Most Underused Tool for Home Service Advertisers
Most roofers, plumbers, and landscapers spend all their time on the keywords they want to show for and almost no time on the ones they do not. Negative keyword management can eliminate 20 to 35% of wasted spend without touching a single bid.
A negative keyword is an instruction to Google telling it when NOT to show your ad. If you are a roofer, you do not want your ad appearing when someone searches for roofing nails, DIY roof repair, or how to patch a roof yourself.
Those searchers are not going to call you. They are trying to solve the problem themselves. Every click from those queries is money wasted, and without negative keywords, Google will absolutely spend your budget on them.
The most common mistake home service advertisers make is spending all their time on the keywords they want to show for while building no negative keyword list at all.
A typical Google Ads account audit for a plumber, landscaper, or pool installer reveals thousands of dollars in wasted spend on irrelevant queries that a proper negative list would have blocked. The fix is not complicated.
The money recovered usually pays for management fees many times over.
Building the list starts before the campaign goes live. Research your keyword list and ask, for every keyword, what else could someone be looking for when they type this?
A landscaper targeting lawn care will get searches for lawn care jobs, lawn care salary, and lawn care certification programs. Those are job seekers and students, not homeowners.
Add jobs, salary, DIY, how to, and free to your negatives before spending a dollar.
Once the campaign is running, weekly search term reviews are the ongoing work. Google shows you exactly what people typed before clicking your ad. Every search term report contains irrelevant queries you did not anticipate.
Add them to your negative list. A mature account that has been running for six months with weekly search term reviews will have a negative keyword list with hundreds of entries, and that list is one of the most valuable things in the account.