The Negative Keyword List Every Trade Account Needs

Ask most trade businesses why their Google Ads did not work and you get the same answer: the leads were rubbish.

Usually they were. Usually that was preventable, and usually nobody prevented it.

What is a negative keyword, in plain terms

Your ads do not only show for the exact words you chose. Google matches your keywords against searches it considers related, and its idea of related is broader than yours.

A negative keyword is you telling it no. Add apprenticeship as a negative and somebody looking for an apprenticeship in your trade stops seeing your ad. You stop paying for that click.

Google's own documentation on adding negative keywords covers the mechanics. What it cannot tell you is which ones your trade needs, because that depends on who else is searching your words for entirely different reasons.

Why this happens at all

It is worth understanding the cause rather than just the fix, because it explains why the problem gets worse rather than better if you leave it.

Keywords have match types. Exact match shows your ad for close variants of what you chose. Phrase match is looser. Broad match, which is what most accounts default to, lets Google show your ad for anything it decides means something similar, and it gets more adventurous when it has budget to spend and nothing better to do with it.

So an account with broad match and no negatives does not stay still. It widens. Month three is reliably worse than month one, which is exactly when most people conclude that ads do not work for their trade.

The four categories that waste trade budgets

1. People doing it themselves

The single biggest leak. Someone searching how to clear a trap, rewire a socket or lay a patio is not hiring anybody. They click, they read, they leave.

Block: how to, DIY, yourself, myself, tutorial, guide, step by step, fix my own, video

2. People who want your job, not your service

Search your trade and a town and you are competing with jobseekers, apprentices and course providers for the same words.

Block: jobs, job, vacancy, vacancies, hiring, apprenticeship, apprentice, salary, wage, course, training, qualification, NVQ, licence, licensing, how to become

3. People buying parts

Suppliers and trade counters sit in the same search space as you, and the people searching are often tradespeople themselves.

Block: parts, supplies, supplier, wholesale, spares, buy, for sale, price list, screwfix, toolstation, bunnings, mitre 10

Adjust the retailer names to your market. Blocking a competitor retailer by name is legitimate; blocking a competing business by name is a different decision and usually not worth it.

4. People who want it for nothing

Block: free, gratis, grant, funded, subsidised, charity, volunteer

Careful with this one. "Free quote" is a search you may well want, so add free quote back as an exception rather than blocking the word outright across the account.

What else is worth blocking

• Services you do not offer. If you do not do commercial, block commercial, industrial, factory, warehouse. If you do not touch gas, block it.
• Places you will not drive to. Geographic negatives catch what radius targeting misses, especially when a town name appears inside the search itself.
• Brands you are not approved for. If somebody wants a manufacturer you do not install, you cannot win that job anyway.
• Research intent. Words like meaning, definition, what is, salary, reviews of, vs, versus, which are people comparing rather than buying.

Campaign level or ad group level?

A distinction worth getting right, because getting it wrong blocks work you wanted.

Campaign level is for anything wrong for the entire business. Jobs, apprenticeships, courses, DIY. Nothing you sell is ever the answer to those.

Ad group level is for things that are wrong in one place and right in another. If you run separate ad groups for bathrooms and drainage, drain is a negative in the bathroom group and a keyword in the drainage one. Put it at campaign level and you have just switched off half your account.

The part most people skip

A launch list is a guess. The search terms report is the truth, and it is where the real list comes from.

It shows the actual phrases people typed before your ad appeared, and it is always stranger than you would predict. I have seen a plumbing account paying for searches about a television programme because the show shared a word with a service.

Here is the routine, and it is fifteen minutes:

1. Open the search terms report, set it to the last seven days
2. Sort by cost, highest first, so you are reading what actually spent money
3. Work down the first thirty rows and ask one question of each: would I have wanted to pay for this?
4. Anything that is a no becomes a negative, at the right level
5. Anything that is a surprising yes becomes a keyword in its own right

Weekly for the first month, then monthly. The account gets cheaper every week rather than more expensive, which is the opposite of what an untended account does.

What this is really doing

Nothing on this page makes your ads better. It makes them narrower, which is not the same thing and is usually worth more.

An account with a good negative list spends the same money on fewer, better-matched clicks. That is the whole mechanism. It is also why I will not quote for running ads without doing this part first, because an account without it is a bucket with a hole in it, and no amount of clever bidding patches that.

If the leads you are getting are poor rather than absent, the problem may not be the keywords at all. Why your Google Ads leads are rubbish covers the other half of it, which is what happens after somebody clicks.