A negative keywords list is a set of words that stop your Google Ads from showing on searches you don't want to pay for — and for service businesses it's the difference between an ad budget that books jobs and one that bleeds. Without it, your ads show to job seekers, students, DIYers, and bargain hunters who click and never call. Add terms like jobs, salary, free, and DIY as negatives and you keep your spend on people who actually want to hire you.
We run ads for our own cleaning and HVAC companies, so we've paid for plenty of the wrong clicks to learn this. Below is a starter list you can copy, the categories to think in, and the one weekly habit that matters more than the list itself.
These apply to almost any home-service account. Add them and you'll block a chunk of waste on day one:
jobs, hiring, careers, salary, pay, wage, apprentice, "near me jobs", employment, resume. People looking for work, not a contractor.
DIY, how to, "do it yourself", tutorial, fix my own, guide, instructions, video. Researchers who plan to do the job themselves.
free, cheap, cheapest, discount, used, second hand, wholesale. Clicks that rarely turn into a paying booked job.
parts, supplies, "for sale", rental, manual, warranty, recall. Shoppers and product searches, not service buyers.
Then add the obvious one for your trade: the names of services you don't offer. An HVAC company that doesn't do duct cleaning should make "duct cleaning" a negative so it stops paying for those clicks.
A starter list helps, but the real money is in the search-terms report — the page in Google Ads that shows the actual queries that triggered your ads. Here's the loop:
Open the search-terms report and sort by clicks.
Find terms with clicks but no calls or form fills — those are your money leaks.
Add them as negatives. Repeat weekly at first, then monthly.
A list you set once and forget goes stale. The report shows you exactly where your specific budget is leaking, which no generic list can.
Negative keywords only matter if you're running Google Search Ads. Skip the worry if:
We don't sell ad management as a standalone product — but the sites we build are wired so your ads optimize against real booked jobs, not page views. First-party conversion tracking, gclid preservation, and lead attribution come built in, so when you (or your ads manager) turn on Search Ads, the negative-keyword work actually shows up as cleaner spend and a clear cost per booked job.
Plans: $249/mo (site, AI lead capture, hosting), $597/mo (adds the SEO content engine and attribution), and from $1,750/mo (adds a custom CRM and reputation automation). Month-to-month, you own everything, free working demo in 48 hours.
Related: Facebook ads for small business, local advertising ideas, website conversion rate, lead generation, and small business marketing.
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Reliable starters: jobs, hiring, salary, career, free, DIY, how to, cheap, used, parts, wholesale, warranty, recall, and the names of services you don't offer. Add competitor terms only if you don't want to bid on them.
Open the search-terms report in Google Ads, find terms with clicks but no calls or conversions, and add them as negatives. Reviewing this weekly at first, then monthly, is the highest-value habit in a service account.
Yes. Without them, broad and phrase-match keywords pull in informational, job-seeker, and DIY searches that click and never convert. A maintained negative list cuts wasted spend and raises the share of clicks that book jobs.
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