Straight answers for local service businesses
Every home service business should start with five buckets of negative keywords: free and DIY terms, job and salary searches, school and licensing terms, parts and product shopping terms, and services or cities you don't cover. Add them as a shared negative keyword list at the account level so every campaign inherits them. Do that before your ads go live and you stop paying for clicks that were never going to call you.
Most ad accounts I look at for trades have zero negative keywords. Not a short list. Zero. Google is happy to keep it that way, because every wasted click still bills.
Here's the thing: you can fix the majority of that waste in about fifteen minutes, before you ever spend a dollar. A starter negative keyword list for home services isn't complicated. It's five buckets of stuff no paying customer would ever type.
Start with these five categories. They apply whether you're a plumber, a roofer, or a house cleaner.
Somebody typing "how to fix a running toilet" is not hiring you. They're standing in the bathroom with their phone.
This is the single biggest leak in trade advertising. "Plumber" and "electrician" are also job titles, and people search them all day looking for work.
People researching how to become the thing you already are.
Someone shopping for a part is going to a supply house, not calling for a service visit.
This one is personal to you. Write down every service you don't offer that sits next to what you do, plus every city that's too far to drive.
Direct answer: don't block anything that signals someone is ready to spend money. I see people block these by accident all the time.
One trap: if you add free as a broad negative, you will also block "free estimate" and "free quote," which are exactly the searches you want. Add phrase negatives instead: "free service," "free repair," "free program," "free download."
Do it once at the account level so it applies everywhere. Campaign-by-campaign negatives are how people end up with three lists that don't match.
Now when you find a bad search term next month, you add it in one place and it's dead everywhere.
Use broad negatives for junk words that can never be good, and phrase negatives when the word is only bad in certain combinations.
Here's the part almost nobody knows: negative keywords do not match close variants. Regular keywords catch plurals and misspellings automatically. Negatives don't. If you block "job," you have not blocked "jobs." If you block "apprenticeship," you have not blocked "apprentice." Add every form: singular, plural, and the misspellings you actually see in your search terms report.
Check your search terms report every two weeks for the first two months, then once a month after that. The starter list handles the obvious stuff. Your own report handles the weird stuff, and the weird stuff is where the real money hides.
You'll find things no list could predict. A painter finding "paint by numbers." A tree service getting "tree of life necklace." A locksmith paying for "lock screen wallpaper." Those clicks cost the same as a real one.
A negative keyword list is not a one-time setup task. It's a filter you tighten every month until only buyers get through.
If you're running ads and you've never opened the search terms report, start there before you touch anything else. Build the list from what you actually see, layered on top of the five buckets above. It's the cheapest thing you'll ever do to your ad account, and it usually pays for itself in the first week.
There's no magic number. A solid starter list runs 60 to 120 terms across the five universal buckets, and it grows every month as you review your search terms report. Quality matters more than count.
No. Google Local Services Ads (the Google Guaranteed ads at the very top) don't use keywords at all, so there's nothing to negate. Negative keywords only apply to standard Google Ads search campaigns.
It can, if you block buying words like "cost," "price," or "near me," or if you use broad negatives too aggressively. Blocking genuine junk almost never hurts. Blocking anything a paying customer might type will.
Yes, and you should for the universal buckets. Build one shared list in the Google Ads shared library and apply it to every campaign. Keep service-specific exclusions separate so you don't block drain cleaning searches in the drain cleaning campaign.
Usually not. Someone searching a competitor's name plus your city is often just comparison shopping and may still call you. The exception is when you keep paying for clicks from people looking for a specific company's warranty or customer service line.
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