Negative Keywords for Contractor Google Ads (Massachusetts)

What negative keywords do

When a homeowner types "roof replacement Worcester MA" into Google, your ad can appear. When a recent high school graduate types "roofing jobs hiring near me," your ad can also appear -- unless you have told Google not to show it for searches containing "jobs" or "hiring." Negative keywords are the instruction that prevents the second scenario from eating your budget.

Google defines negative keywords as terms that prevent your ads from showing when a query includes those words. In plain contractor terms: they are the filter between your ad spend and the searches that will never become a phone call from someone who needs your work done.

For a Massachusetts contractor running Google Ads, the absence of a solid negative keyword list is one of the most common causes of campaigns that look active but produce weak or overpriced leads. Clicks cost money whether they come from a homeowner planning a $15,000 roof replacement or from someone looking for a free DIY tutorial. Negative keywords make sure the budget is weighted toward the former.

This matters especially for contractors in Massachusetts, where search volume is competitive and cost-per-click is elevated. The greater Worcester and Boston metro markets see average costs-per-click in the $18 to $40 range for roofing and HVAC keywords, according to industry benchmarks. Wasting 30 percent of that spend on irrelevant searches translates directly to fewer real calls per month.

The budget math: 20 to 40 percent recovery

The 20 to 40 percent figure is not a guarantee, but it reflects a consistent pattern seen in contractor campaign audits. When a campaign has been running without negative keyword maintenance -- especially when it uses broad match or phrase match keywords -- the Search Terms report typically reveals a significant share of spend going to queries that had no realistic conversion path.

Common examples in contractor campaigns:

• Employment searches: "roofing jobs," "HVAC apprentice program," "plumber salary Massachusetts"
• DIY and how-to searches: "how to fix a roof leak," "DIY roof shingles," "HVAC repair tutorial"
• Legal and complaint searches: "roofing contractor lawsuit," "HVAC company complaint," "scam contractor reviews"
• Warranty and recall searches: "roof warranty claim," "HVAC recall notice"
• Wrong trade or wrong service: "metal roofing" for an asphalt-only roofer, "tile installation" for a roofer who does not do tile
• School and training searches: "HVAC school Boston," "plumbing certification course," "roofing training program"

None of those searches will convert to a booked job for a residential contractor running a standard lead-generation campaign. If those query types collectively account for 25 percent of impressions, and match types are loose enough to trigger a similar share of clicks, that is a meaningful portion of a monthly budget going to noise.

Recovery does not mean total savings -- some of that recaptured budget often gets redeployed into the auction, raising impression share for the searches that matter. The result is not necessarily a lower spend but a higher proportion of spend on qualified traffic.

Universal contractor negatives

These categories apply to almost every residential contractor campaign regardless of trade. They should be reviewed first and placed in a shared account-level list.

Employment, career, and hiring terms

Job seekers search using the same service words contractors target. A homeowner searching "roofing contractor" and an applicant searching "roofing contractor job" look similar to a broad-match keyword. Common terms to exclude:

• job
• jobs
• career
• careers
• hiring
• salary
• wages
• apprentice
• apprenticeship
• training
• school
• course
• program
• certification
• resume
• apply
• employment

If you are running a separate hiring campaign, these terms stay out of that campaign's negative list. For any homeowner lead-generation campaign, they belong in negatives.

DIY and free-help terms

Homeowners who search "DIY" are planning to do the work themselves. They are not going to call you. The same is true for most "how to" and "free" searches in a contractor context.

• DIY
• do it yourself
• how to
• free
• tutorial
• YouTube
• instructions
• guide
• supplies
• materials only

There are edge cases. "Free estimate" is a phrase a homeowner who does want to hire might use. Handle that with a phrase-match negative for "free estimate" only if your data shows it performs poorly, rather than blocking "free" broadly at account level.

Legal, complaint, and reputation terms

Searches that include legal and complaint language typically come from people in conflict with a contractor or investigating a company's reputation. These searches rarely convert into new hire calls:

• lawsuit
• scam
• complaint
• fraud
• review
• bad reviews
• complaints against
• license suspended
• unlicensed

Add these carefully. "Review" alone could block some comparison-shopping searches that do convert. Use phrase-match negatives ("scam," "complaint," "lawsuit") rather than broad-match to reduce over-blocking.

Warranty and recall terms

Warranty searches often come from existing customers, not new prospects:

• warranty
• warranty claim
• recall
• manufacturer defect

Trade-specific negatives

Universal terms cover a lot of ground. Trade-specific negatives address the searches that are wrong for your particular service scope.

Roofers

A roofer who only installs asphalt shingles should not be paying for searches about materials or styles they do not offer:

• Metal roofing: "metal roof," "standing seam," "steel roofing," "copper roofing" -- exclude if you do not install metal
• Tile roofing: "tile roof," "clay tile," "concrete tile," "Spanish tile" -- exclude if you do not install tile
• Slate: "slate roof," "slate shingles" -- exclude if slate is not offered
• Roof rack products: "roof rack," "cargo rack," "car roof rack" -- a different product category entirely
• Roofing materials retail: "buy shingles," "shingles for sale," "roofing supply store"

Plumbers

Plumbing searches attract a wide range of non-service queries:

• DIY plumbing: "fix leaky faucet myself," "replace toilet flapper," "how to unclog drain" -- these searchers are not calling a plumber
• Parts and product searches: "toilet parts," "pipe fittings," "faucet replacement cartridge"
• Plumbing supply retail: "plumbing supply store," "buy copper pipe"
• Gas line specialty: If you do not do gas work, exclude "gas line," "gas fitting," "natural gas pipe"

HVAC contractors

HVAC campaigns are particularly vulnerable to training and school searches because many vocational keywords overlap with service keywords:

• Education searches: "HVAC school," "HVAC course," "HVAC certification program," "HVAC technician training," "HVAC degree" -- high volume, zero conversion for service campaigns
• Equipment and parts retail: "buy HVAC unit," "furnace replacement parts," "AC coil for sale"
• Appliance overlap: "refrigerator repair," "dishwasher repair," "washer dryer repair" -- if you are HVAC-only
• Commercial HVAC: "commercial HVAC," "industrial refrigeration," "chiller system" -- if you are residential-only

General remodelers

Remodeling keyword sets are broad by nature, which makes negative keyword discipline more important:

• Handyman/small job: "handyman," "small repair," "odd jobs," "fix it" -- if you focus on larger remodeling projects
• Rental and investment property: "rental property repair," "landlord contractor" -- if you focus on owner-occupied residential
• Permits only: "permit application," "building permit fee" -- people researching the permit process, not hiring a remodeler

Mining the Search Terms report

No pre-built list is a substitute for reading your own campaign's data. The Search Terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads -- that is the ground truth for what your campaign is attracting.

How to access it

In Google Ads, navigate to Campaigns, select your campaign, then choose Keywords from the left menu. Select Search Terms from the sub-menu. This view shows every search query that triggered an impression and, where data is available, clicks, cost, conversions, and conversion value.

Google does not show every search query due to privacy thresholds, but the report covers the majority of spend and is the most actionable data source in the account.

What to look for each month

Sort the report by cost descending. Work down the list, asking four questions about each search term:

1. Is this a real search from someone who could become a customer?
2. Is the service this person is searching for something we actually offer?
3. Is the geography implied in this search within our service area?
4. Did this search produce any contact with us, or just a click?

Terms that fail on any of those questions are candidates for a negative keyword. Terms that fail on all four are immediate additions.

Frequency of review

Review monthly once a campaign has been running for more than 90 days and is in a steady state. Review weekly when a campaign is new, when you have just changed match types, when you have added new keywords, or when lead quality has dropped noticeably. A campaign that has not had its Search Terms report reviewed in more than 60 days has almost certainly accumulated meaningful waste.

Account-level negative keyword lists

Google Ads allows you to create shared negative keyword lists that can be applied to multiple campaigns simultaneously. Shared negative lists live at the account level and are managed from Tools, then Shared Library, then Negative keyword lists.

Using a shared list instead of adding the same negative to each campaign individually has two practical advantages. First, it reduces maintenance time -- when you identify a new universal negative, you add it once and it applies everywhere. Second, it reduces the risk of forgetting to add a new negative to a campaign that was created after the original cleanup.

A practical setup for a Massachusetts contractor running multiple campaigns:

• List 1 -- Universal contractor negatives: All employment terms, DIY terms, legal terms, and warranty terms. Applied to every campaign in the account.
• List 2 -- Trade exclusions: Materials and product terms specific to services you do not offer. Applied to relevant campaigns.
• List 3 -- Geography exclusions: Specific towns or regions you do not serve, if they appear persistently in your Search Terms report. Applied with caution -- see the section below on when not to add a negative.

Separate from shared lists, use campaign-level negatives for exclusions that only apply to a single campaign, such as blocking a specific competitor's brand name from a campaign that is not intended for conquest targeting.

Match types for negatives

Negative keywords have three match types, and the choice affects how aggressively they block traffic.

Exact match negative: Blocks only searches that exactly match the term (and close variants). Use for terms where the word alone is fine but the specific phrase is not -- for example, [free estimate] as a negative blocks "free estimate" but not "estimate for roofing."

Phrase match negative: Blocks any search containing the phrase in the same order. This is the most commonly useful type for contractor campaigns. Phrase match negatives for "roofing jobs" block "roofing jobs near me," "roofing jobs hiring Worcester," and similar queries without blocking unrelated uses of "roofing."

Broad match negative: Blocks any search containing all the words in the negative, in any order. Use broad match negatives sparingly and only for words that are unambiguously bad in any context, such as "salary" or "DIY."

A safe default: start with phrase-match for most negatives, and only move to broad-match when you are confident the word cannot appear in a legitimate homeowner search.

When not to add a negative

Negative keywords can block good leads if applied without care. Three situations where restraint is warranted:

One bad lead is not a pattern. If a single search term produced one poor-quality call, that is not enough evidence to block it permanently. Look for repeated spend with no conversions over a meaningful number of impressions before adding a negative. The threshold depends on your average cost-per-click, but generally: terms with five or more clicks and zero contact events are candidates; a single click is not.

The word appears in good searches too. "Cost" is a common example. Homeowners who search "roof replacement cost Worcester" are often in a buying cycle -- they are comparing prices before choosing a contractor. Blocking "cost" to avoid early-stage traffic will also block people planning a real project. Better to improve the landing page to address pricing factors than to exclude the term.

Geography negatives require extra care. Adding a town name as a negative can block searches that mention that town as a comparison point rather than as a destination. "Roofing contractor Worcester vs Marlborough" might trigger a Worcester campaign if Marlborough is a negative. Test geographic exclusions against your location targeting settings rather than relying on negative keywords to do that work.

Connecting negatives to lead tracking

Negative keyword cleanup without lead tracking is incomplete. You need a way to measure whether the campaign is producing better leads after the cleanup, not just fewer clicks.

Google Ads call conversion tracking connects phone calls from your ads to specific campaigns and keywords. When a call tracking number appears in your ad, Google can report which keywords and campaigns produced calls that met your duration threshold. Pair this with GA4 form submission events to track inbound form leads from the same campaigns.

The questions to answer after a negative keyword cleanup:

• Did cost-per-call go down, stay flat, or increase?
• Did the share of calls from service-area searches increase?
• Did the calls that came in convert to estimates at a higher rate?
• Which remaining search terms have high cost and no calls?

If cost-per-call went up after cleanup, that can mean the cleanup removed volume without improving quality -- which is worth investigating. If it went down, the negative keywords are doing their job. Tracking this data monthly makes the next round of cleanup more targeted.

For a broader look at how to connect ads to actual booked jobs, the contractor lead tracking guide covers the full system including call recording, form tracking, and CRM integration for Massachusetts contractors.

Building a monthly cleanup routine

Negative keyword management is not a one-time task. The search landscape shifts, match types evolve, and Google's broad match interpretation broadens over time. A monthly 20-minute review is enough to stay ahead of accumulating waste.

A reliable monthly process:

1. Open the Search Terms report for the past 30 days.
2. Sort by cost descending.
3. Scan the top 50 to 100 rows for anything that fails the four questions from the mining section above.
4. Group the bad terms into buckets: employment, DIY, wrong service, wrong location, legal.
5. Decide the right match type for each negative: phrase for most, broad for unambiguous exclusions, exact for nuanced situations.
6. Add universals to the shared account-level list. Add campaign-specifics at the campaign level.
7. Document what was added and why -- a simple notes column in a spreadsheet works.
8. Review call and form quality data two weeks later to check for unintended consequences.

For new campaigns in their first 60 days, do this weekly instead of monthly. Early campaigns are the most likely to accumulate waste quickly because the account has not yet established click-through rate and quality score signals that narrow match behavior.

Where GroundSet starts

When GroundSet reviews a Massachusetts contractor's Google Ads account, the Search Terms report is the first document examined. Before adjusting bids, restructuring campaigns, or changing ad copy, the question is: what is this campaign actually paying for? The answer usually contains a mix of qualified searches and noise, and the ratio between them tells you more about the account's health than any other single metric.

For contractors whose campaigns are spending but producing weak or inconsistent leads, negative keyword cleanup is part of a systematic account review that also covers location targeting, campaign structure, landing page alignment, and call tracking. Google Ads management for contractors ties these elements together rather than treating negative keywords as a standalone fix.

If your campaigns are spending but the leads feel wrong, a free site and ads audit is the starting point. The audit covers search terms, targeting, structure, and tracking before any recommendations are made.