Negative Keywords for Tradies: Stop Paying for Searches That Never Become Jobs

The waste hiding in plain sight

Every trade business running Google Ads has the same leak: clicks from people who were never going to become customers. Job seekers, DIYers hunting for free advice, and bargain hunters typing “cheap” in front of everything. None of them convert, and every one of them costs money.

Negative keywords are how you plug that leak. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s one of the highest-leverage things you can do in an account, and it’s exactly the kind of ongoing management that separates a campaign that’s actually managed from one that’s just switched on and left alone.

Who’s clicking your ads for free

A few categories account for most of the wasted spend I see in trade accounts:

• Job seekers. Searches like “plumber jobs Christchurch” or “electrician apprenticeship” have nothing to do with hiring a tradesperson, but they can trigger a poorly built campaign.
• DIYers. “How to unblock a drain myself” or “DIY electrical wiring” are research searches, not hiring searches. They’ll click, read, and leave.
• Price shoppers and freebie hunters. “Cheap plumber near me”, “free quote no callout fee”, these searches skew toward people comparing on price alone, which may or may not be who you want to attract.
• Wrong service entirely. A landscaper’s ad showing for “landscape photography” is an extreme example, but overly broad match types cause smaller versions of this constantly.

Start with a core negative list

Before you even look at your own data, there’s a sensible starting list most trade accounts benefit from:

• job, jobs, career, careers, apprenticeship, salary, hiring
• how to, diy, tutorial, course, training
• free (unless “free quote” is part of your own offer, in which case be specific about what you’re blocking)
• cheap, discount (only if this doesn’t match your positioning)

Add these at the campaign or account level as a shared list, so you’re not rebuilding it for every campaign you run.

Then build from the search terms report

The generic list only gets you so far. The real gold is in your own search terms report, which shows the actual words and phrases that triggered your ads, not just the keywords you bid on.

Go through it and ask, for every term with clicks but no conversions: would this person ever realistically become a paying customer? If not, it’s a negative keyword candidate.

This is where match types matter. A phrase match negative blocks a phrase in that word order; an exact match negative blocks only that exact search. Getting this wrong is how a well-meaning negative accidentally blocks genuine customers, so double-check what a broad negative will actually filter out before you add it at the account level.

Review it, don’t set it and forget it

New junk searches don’t stop appearing just because you cleaned the list once. Language shifts, seasons change what people search for, and Google’s own broad matching keeps testing new variations against your keywords.

A sensible cadence: weekly checks for the first month or two of a new campaign, tapering to fortnightly or monthly once the obvious waste is filtered out. This is the same ongoing discipline I cover in what Google Ads management actually includes, search-term reviews are one of the recurring jobs that separates active management from a campaign left to run itself.

Track the right conversions to make this easier

Negative keywords are only as good as your ability to see what’s actually converting. If your conversion tracking isn’t properly set up, calls, forms, bookings, you’re guessing at which search terms are wasting money instead of knowing.

Get that foundation right, and a weekly look at the search terms report becomes a quick, high-value habit rather than a chore. If you’d rather have someone doing this filtering for you every week, that’s exactly the kind of ongoing work I do as part of Google Ads management. Get in touch if your account’s been bleeding budget on clicks that were never going to become jobs.