How do you find and update negative keywords for local service businesses?

Use Google Ads Keyword Planner. Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free tool that can help you find relevant keywords for your business. When you use Keyword Planner, you can also see how often people search for those keywords and how much it would cost to show your ad for those searches.

The need for negative keywords is every bit as important as keyword research. Getting the right negative keywords is of the utmost importance.

Review your search term reports. Google Ads provides search term reports that show you all of the keywords that triggered your ads. You can use these reports to identify irrelevant keywords that you can add to your negative keyword list. Ask your customers. Your customers can be a great source of information about irrelevant keywords. Ask them what they searched for when they found your business and add those keywords to your negative keyword list.

In my experience, negative keywords often need to be more utilized. Irrelevant search terms can eat away at ad budgets quickly. The results can be astronomical. I recently audited an account with an annual ad budget of $100k. Just under $30k was wasted on irrelevant searches. Adding negative keywords gives them $30k more this year for local advertising.

Once you have a list of negative keywords, you can add them to your Google Ads account. To do this, go to the Keywords tab and click the Negative keywords tab. Then, enter your negative keywords into the text box and click Add. It's important to regularly review your negative keyword list and update it as needed. This will help you ensure that your ads are only shown to people who are likely to be interested in your business.

I agree. Getting the match type correct is very important. The wrong match type for negative keywords can either block too much or too little to be effective. Choose carefully.

This should be done constantly to ensure that budgets are not being wasted. Negative keywords can dramatically change the cost per conversion for a paid search campaign.

Be specific. The more specific your negative keywords are, the better. For example, if you're a plumber, you might want to add negative keywords like "free" and "cheap." Use negative keyword match types. Google Ads offers a variety of negative keyword match types. The match type you choose will determine how closely your negative keyword matches the search terms that trigger your ads. For example, a negative keyword with a broad match type will match any search term that contains the keyword, while a negative keyword with a phrase match type will only match search terms that contain the keyword in a specific order. Use negative keyword lists. You can create negative keyword lists to organize your negative keywords.

Be sure to upvote my comments throughout this article so I can continue to contribute to assist everyone in LinkedIn as a Top Voice By following these tips, you can find and update negative keywords that will help you improve the performance of your Google Ads campaign.