Negative keywords for a West Midlands radius

A Birmingham Google Ads account needs three shared negative keyword lists before it spends a pound: one for the intent you do not want, jobs, courses, free and DIY; one for the sector's own false friends, the words that mean something different to a supplier, a student or a hobbyist; and one for the West Midlands place names you do not serve, because in a conurbation where the towns run into each other the radius will let them in. The lists are built once, shared across every campaign, and grown every week from the search terms report. Here is what goes on each, at which match type, and the mistakes that block the searches you wanted.

What a negative keyword does, and what it does not

A negative keyword stops your ad from showing for searches that contain it. It is the mirror of a keyword, and it works with the same match types, with one important difference: negatives do not expand to close variants and synonyms the way positive keywords do. A negative for "jobs" does not block "job" or "vacancies". So each list needs the plurals, the synonyms and the misspellings written out, which is most of the work and the reason a generator helps.

List one: intent you never want

The same words for every business. Jobs, job, vacancies, vacancy, careers, recruitment, apprenticeship, apprenticeships, course, courses, training, salary, wage, how to, DIY, free, cheap, cheapest, second hand, used (unless you sell used), definition, meaning, wiki, PDF, template, download. In a city with five universities and several colleges these are a large share of the wasted spend in every sector we have read, and they are the easiest to prevent. This list goes on as phrase match negatives, so "electrician jobs Birmingham" is blocked and "electrician Birmingham" is not.

List two: the sector's false friends

Every trade shares its words with people who are not customers. For an electrician, "electrician" also matches wholesalers, salary searches and the college. For a jeweller, "ring" matches ring meanings, ring sizes and a great deal of astronomy. For a solicitor, "solicitor" matches legal aid, the SRA register and training contracts. For a garage, "MOT" matches the government's MOT history checker, which is free. The list is sector-specific and it is the one our free generator on Competitor Watch produces: type the sector and it returns the words that pull in the wrong people, ready to paste.

List three: the West Midlands place names

This is the list that is specific to Birmingham, and the one most accounts we read do not have. The conurbation is continuous, so a radius from almost anywhere in it includes towns you do not serve, and a searcher in Solihull typing "plumber Dudley" is telling you they want Dudley. The place-name list blocks the search whatever the searcher's location. It is built from the towns and districts outside your patch, at phrase match, and it is different for every client because every patch is different.

Match types for negatives, and the mistake that costs the most

Phrase match negatives block any search containing the phrase in that order, which is right for most of the lists above. Exact match negatives block only that exact search, which is right for a single term you want to keep in other combinations. Broad match negatives block any search containing all the words in any order, and they are where accounts over-block: a broad negative for "free quote" blocks "free quote" and also "quote for a free-standing bath". The most expensive mistake we see is a negative for the city's own name, added to block "Birmingham jobs" and blocking every search from a customer who typed Birmingham. Block "jobs", not the city.

The weekly routine that grows the lists

1. Open the search terms report for the last seven days and sort by cost.
2. Read every row. Mark the searches that could never have become a customer.
3. For each, decide which list it belongs to and which match type blocks it without blocking a search you want.
4. Add them to the shared list, not to the campaign, so every campaign benefits.
5. Look at how each got in: a broad match keyword, a one-word phrase match, a close variant. Tighten the keyword if it keeps letting the same kind of search through.
6. Once a quarter, read the negative lists themselves and remove anything that has started blocking a search you now want, such as a new service or a new town.

A test for any Birmingham account: search your own negative lists for the name of your own suburb and for the word Birmingham. If either is there, someone has been blocking your customers to stop a handful of job searches, and the fix takes a minute.

Negatives in Shopping and Performance Max

Standard Shopping campaigns take negatives the same way and need the same three lists, plus product-specific ones: "meaning", "size chart", a competitor's brand you do not stock. Performance Max accepts account-level negatives and, for most accounts, brand exclusions, and that is nearly the whole of the control you have over what it matches, which is one reason it is run beside a Search campaign rather than instead of one.