Straight answers for local service businesses
For most local service businesses, the smarter move is to block competitor names as negative keywords, not bid on them. People searching for a specific company by name usually already picked that company, so those clicks are expensive and rarely convert. Bidding on competitor names in Google Ads is legal in the US as a keyword, but you cannot use their name in your ad text. Only test competitor bidding once your own service and city keywords are fully covered and you have budget left over.
For most local trades, no. Block them instead.
Think about what a search for "Miller Plumbing Medford" actually means. That person got a referral, saw a truck, or used you last year. They are not shopping. They are navigating. When you buy that click, you are paying to interrupt a decision that is already made.
Compare that to someone typing "water heater replacement Medford." That person has a problem and no company in mind. That is the click worth money.
Competitor bidding is not evil and it is not forbidden. It is just usually the worst dollar in a small ad budget. If your service keywords, city keywords, and emergency keywords are not all running at full coverage yet, you have nowhere near enough budget to fund a fight over someone else's brand.
Google prices clicks partly on relevance. Your ad for "Miller Plumbing" is not relevant to a search for Miller Plumbing, because you are not Miller Plumbing. Low relevance means a low quality score, which means you pay more per click than the real Miller Plumbing pays to defend its own name.
So you are paying a premium for the least ready-to-switch audience on the internet. Two strikes.
There is a third. Conversion rate on brand-defense traffic is typically dismal, which means your cost per lead on those keywords looks awful next to your regular campaigns. If you are running one shared budget, those bad clicks are stealing impressions from your good keywords.
In the US, yes, you can bid on a competitor's business name as a keyword. Google allows it. Trademark owners can complain, but Google generally does not restrict keyword targeting on that basis.
What you cannot do is use their trademarked name in your ad text. If a competitor has filed a trademark complaint with Google, their name gets blocked from headlines and descriptions across advertisers. Even without a complaint, writing an ad that implies you are them, or that they sent you, is asking for a legal letter and a bad reputation in a small town.
And in a small town, reputation matters more than a few clicks. Contractors talk. Suppliers talk. If the other plumber in town finds out you are bidding on his name, that is a relationship you spent for nothing.
A few narrow cases:
If you do test it, put competitor keywords in their own campaign with its own small budget. Never mix them with your money keywords. Give it a month, judge it on booked jobs, and kill it without sentiment if it does not pay.
Yes, and this is the part almost nobody does. Blocking competitor names is the higher-value half of this question.
Here is what happens if you skip it. You run broad or phrase match keywords, or you run Performance Max, and Google starts matching your ads to searches like "Miller Plumbing reviews" or "is ABC Heating any good." You did not choose those searches. Google chose them for you, and you paid for them.
Build one shared negative keyword list and put in it:
Apply the list to every campaign, including Performance Max, which needs negatives added at the account or campaign level.
Open Google Ads, go to your campaign, and look at the search terms report for the last 30 to 90 days. Sort by cost, highest first. Read every line.
You are looking for two things: company names you recognize, and clicks with cost but no conversions. Anything that is clearly someone shopping a different business gets added as a negative right there. It takes fifteen minutes a month and it usually finds money.
Do this before you increase your budget. Almost every account we open has spend leaking somewhere in that report.
First, do not panic. Most of those clicks convert poorly for them, same as they would for you.
Second, run a small campaign on your own name. Exact match, your business name and a couple of variations, tiny budget. Because the search is perfectly relevant to you, those clicks are usually cheap, and you sit above the competitor who is trying to poach. It is the one form of brand bidding that consistently earns its keep.
Third, make your own listing hard to skip. A complete Google Business Profile, a steady stream of recent reviews, and a landing page that names your city and your services means that even when someone searches your name and sees a competitor's ad, they scroll one line down and find you looking like the obvious choice.
Block competitor names to protect your budget. Bid on your own name to protect your customers. Only bid on theirs when you have money left over and something genuinely better to offer.
If you are not sure which bucket your spend is in right now, pull the search terms report. The answer is in there.
No. In the US, keyword targeting on a competitor's name is allowed. What can get an ad disapproved is using their trademarked name in your headline or description, especially if that company has filed a trademark complaint with Google.
Barely, and in a good way. You lose impressions from people who were searching for someone else by name, which frees budget for searches describing the actual job you want.
It is optional. If you already rank first organically and in the map pack for your own name, you can skip it. If competitors or directory sites appear above you for your name, a tiny exact-match campaign is cheap insurance.
Go to Tools, then Shared Library, then Negative keyword lists. Create one list, add your competitor and irrelevant terms, and apply it to every campaign so you only maintain it in one place.
Usually yes, unless you specifically want to compete for people browsing those platforms. Those searchers are typically looking for the directory, not for your company, so the clicks tend to be expensive and low intent.
We build it, launch it, and handle everything. $499 one time, live in minutes.
See how it works