The Negative Keyword List Every Home-Service Google Ads Account Is Missing (and What It's Costing You Monthly)
Most home-service Google Ads accounts we audit have somewhere between zero and about fifteen negative keywords. That's the whole list.
Then we pull the search terms report — the actual words people typed before clicking — and 20 to 40% of the spend went to searches that were never going to become a job. Not bad leads. Not slow leads. Not leads at all.
Here's what's usually in there, and how to figure out what it's costing you this month.
First, look at what you actually paid for
In Google Ads, open the search terms report and set the date range to the last 90 days. Sort by cost, highest first.
Read the top 100. Not the keywords you bid on — the searches that triggered your ads. Most owners have never done this, and it's usually an uncomfortable 20 minutes.
You're looking for anything that falls into one of the buckets below. Every one of those is money that left the account without a chance of coming back.
The seven buckets that eat home-service budgets
1. People looking for a job, not a service. This is almost always the biggest one. jobs, hiring, careers, apprentice, salary, how much do plumbers make, near me hiring. Somebody searching "roofing jobs" is not going to buy a roof. Add these first.
2. DIY searches. DIY, how to, tutorial, video, YouTube, step by step, myself, my own. Somebody typing "how to fix a leaking faucet" wants a video, not an invoice. There are exceptions — a DIYer who gets in over their head sometimes calls — but you're paying full price for a very low chance.
3. Free-and-cheap searches. free, cheap, cheapest, budget, discount, coupon, low cost, bargain. These clicks convert into calls at a decent rate and into signed jobs at a terrible one. If you sell on quality, this traffic is a tax.
4. Education and training. school, course, class, certification, license, training, how to become, degree, exam. Aspiring tradespeople, not homeowners.
5. Products instead of service. for sale, buy, parts, supply, rental, wholesale, Home Depot, Lowes, Amazon. If you install it and they want to buy it, that's someone else's click.
6. Wrong service. Every trade has neighbors it gets confused with. Roofers pick up gutter cleaning and solar. Plumbers pick up septic pumping and drain snake rentals. Remodelers pick up interior decorating and furniture. If you don't do it, negative it.
7. Wrong place. Geographic negatives are the ones people forget entirely. If you serve three counties, you're probably still paying for searches naming cities two hours away — plus the state-name and "near me + other city" searches that slip through location targeting.
Now do the math
Grab a spreadsheet. It takes ten minutes.
- Export the last 90 days of search terms with cost and conversions.
- Tag each term: keep or waste.
- Sum the cost of everything tagged waste.
- Divide by 3. That's your monthly bleed.
Here's what that looks like on a real budget. Say you spend $4,000 a month and 25% of it went to those seven buckets. That's $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year, spent on clicks that had no path to a job.
Now flip it. If your average job is $8,000 and you close 1 in 5 estimates, that $1,000 a month redirected into searches that actually convert doesn't just save money — it buys more estimates. Most contractors are shocked at how much room exists in a budget they thought was maxed out.
Build the list in three layers
Layer 1 — the account-level list. Every negative that applies to your whole business: job seekers, DIY, education, free/cheap, product searches. In Google Ads, build this as a shared negative keyword list and apply it to every campaign. Build it once, and every new campaign inherits it.
Layer 2 — campaign-level. Service-specific exclusions. Your repair campaign should exclude replacement terms and vice versa, so the two campaigns stop competing with each other and your data stays clean.
Layer 3 — ad-group level. This is where you separate close cousins so each ad group serves the right ad. Emergency versus scheduled. Commercial versus residential. Install versus repair.
Match types matter more than people think
A negative keyword in broad match blocks searches containing all of those words in any order. Phrase match blocks the phrase in order. Exact match blocks only that exact search.
Practical version: use phrase match for most negatives. Use exact match when a word is only sometimes bad — "commercial" might be a great term for you in one context and worthless in another. And be careful with single broad-match words, because one careless negative can quietly shut off a chunk of good traffic.
Which is the whole reason to review, not just add.
Make it a routine, not a project
Search terms change. New phrasing shows up every month, and Google's matching gets looser over time, not tighter.
- Weekly, first 90 days of any campaign: scan the search terms report and add negatives.
- Monthly after that: same scan, 15 minutes.
- Quarterly: review the negative list itself and pull anything that's blocking traffic you actually want.
Put it on the calendar with a name attached. "We'll get to it" is how accounts end up with fifteen negatives and a five-figure annual leak.
One more thing to check while you're in there
Negative keywords fix which searches you pay for. They don't fix what happens after the click. If the page people land on doesn't answer the question they just typed, you've bought a better click and wasted it anyway — which is why we spend so much time on what a contractor homepage needs above the fold. And if leads sit for an hour before anyone calls back, the source of the lead barely matters; the speed-to-lead math is brutal.
Cheaper clicks, a page that converts, and a fast callback are the same system. Fixing one of the three gets you a third of the result.
Want us to look at yours?
We do this for home-service companies every week — pull the search terms report, tag the waste, build the layered negative list, and show you the number. If you'd rather have somebody else run it, book a discovery call and we'll go through your account with you.
Either way, pull the report. The number is already there.
