Straight answers for local service businesses
Use broad negatives for words you never want in any search (free, DIY, salary, jobs). Use phrase negatives for two or three word ideas where order matters ("tankless water heater", "window ac"). Use exact negatives only when you want to block one specific search but keep everything built around it. In Google Ads, no punctuation means broad, quotation marks mean phrase, and square brackets mean exact, and the default when you paste a list in is broad.
Most contractors running Google Ads add negative keywords the fast way: copy a list, paste it in, hit save. That works most of the time. But every few weeks it backfires, and someone blocks a word that was quietly bringing in half their jobs.
The fix is understanding what the three negative keyword match types actually do. It takes about five minutes.
All three stop your ad from showing. They just differ in how wide the net is.
Say you're an HVAC company and you add the negative window ac.
Broad is the widest. Exact is the narrowest. Phrase sits in the middle and is the one most trades underuse.
The punctuation does the work:
If you paste a list of words with no punctuation, Google treats them all as broad negatives. That is the default, and it's why accidental over-blocking is so common.
Here's the rule I give every plumber and electrician I set ads up for: match the match type to how dangerous the word is on its own.
These are single words that signal the wrong person no matter what surrounds them:
A plumber in Medford is never going to win a job from "plumber salary Massachusetts." Block salary broad and be done with it. One word, covered forever.
This is where word order matters and broad gets you in trouble. A water heater company that doesn't touch tankless units should add "tankless" as a phrase negative, not block the word water heater in some clumsy combination. A landscaper who does maintenance but not hardscaping adds "retaining wall" and "paver patio" as phrases.
Phrase negatives are also right for neighboring towns you won't drive to: "in Springfield" as a phrase blocks "plumber in Springfield" without blocking every search that happens to contain the word Springfield.
Exact negatives are rare, and that's fine. Use them when a bare, one-word search is worthless but the longer versions are gold.
Example: a landscaper who sells installed mulch beds. The search "mulch" by itself is usually someone pricing bags at a garden center. But "mulch installation," "mulch delivery," and "mulch beds near me" are real jobs. Add [mulch] as an exact negative. You block the tire kicker and keep every job-shaped search.
Same logic for a painter and the word [paint], or an electrician and [generator].
Two failure modes, and they cost you in opposite directions.
Too broad. A cleaning company adds office as a broad negative because they only do residential. Now they're blocked from "house cleaning near my office," which was a perfectly good lead. Worse, broad negatives with two common words block far more than people expect, because order doesn't matter and extra words are allowed.
Too narrow. Someone adds [plumber jobs] as exact, feeling precise. Then "plumber jobs near me," "plumber jobs hiring," and "plumbing jobs" all sail right through and eat clicks. Exact blocks one string. That's it.
When you're unsure, phrase is the safest middle. It's specific enough not to wreck good traffic and wide enough to actually catch the pattern.
Historically, no. Regular keywords match close variants automatically. Negative keywords have not worked that way, which trips people up constantly.
If you block job, you may still show for "jobs." If you block plumber, you may still show for "plumbr." So add the variations yourself:
Negative keywords are free and there's no meaningful limit for a small local account. Over-listing variations costs you nothing.
Put the universal stuff at the account level and the surgical stuff lower down.
One warning about ad group negatives: they only apply to that ad group. People add them there, then wonder why the same junk search shows up in a different campaign.
Open your search terms report. For each wasted search you find, ask one question: is the problem one word, or the way the words sit together?
One word, always bad, add it broad. Two or three words in a specific order, add it phrase. One exact string that's useless while its longer cousins are valuable, add it exact.
Do that for fifteen minutes a week for a month and your negative list will be better than most agencies build. And if you'd rather the ads point somewhere that actually converts once you've cleaned them up, that's a separate conversation worth having about your site.
Broad. If you paste a list of words with no quotation marks or square brackets, Google treats each line as a broad negative, meaning it blocks any search containing all of those words in any order.
Yes, if it's too broad or overlaps with your actual keywords. If you add a negative that conflicts with a keyword you're bidding on, the negative wins and that keyword stops serving. Check for overlap before you save a long list.
There's no magic number. Most local trade accounts land somewhere between 50 and 300 once they've been running a few months. What matters is that they came from your own search terms report, not a generic list you found online.
You can apply account-level negative keyword lists to Performance Max, and Google has expanded campaign-level negative options over time. It's less precise than a Search campaign, so if wasted spend is your main problem, a standard Search campaign gives you far more control.
Phrase is usually safer, especially if the competitor's name contains a common word. Blocking a word like "summit" or "premier" as a broad negative can knock out searches that have nothing to do with that company.
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