We seeded Google's Keyword Planner with 20 repair services, from brakes to car AC, and set the location to our example market, Portland, Oregon. Two of the searches it handed back sat in the same list. "Car ac repair near me": roughly 1,000 local searches a month, past top-of-page bids from $3.15 to $10.00. "Ac repair near me": roughly 1,300 a month, past top-of-page bids from $28.47 to $140.00.
The second search doesn't say "car." Our reading of those bids: they look like home heating-and-cooling prices, which means the shops paying them are selling to a hot living room, not a hot dashboard. A repair shop that adds it because it was in the AC list is bidding against them for a customer who wants a furnace tech.
That's what keyword research for a repair shop mostly is. Keyword Planner is generous, and it doesn't know what your bays do. This chapter builds the list the way we build it for every repair account, and shows what has to come out before anything goes live. Chapter 4 set up the ad groups by service and make; this is where they get their keywords.
Ad Preview Shows Which Shops Bid on Your Searches Without Costing Anyone a Click
Before any list, a look at the competition. Google Ads includes a tool for exactly this, Ad Preview and Diagnosis. Give it "brake repair," set the location to your town, and it lays out the rival ads a driver there would see. Google's own description of the point: you see similar results to a real search while avoiding "accumulating ad impressions" that would skew performance numbers.
Run your main searches through it, set to your town: "auto repair near me," "brake repair," "check engine light," your best makes. Write down the shops and chains that show up. Don't click their ads to look around. A click costs them money, muddies the auction picture and tells you nothing the preview didn't.
Google's Ads Transparency Center adds the other half: every Search ad a given business has run recently. We used it to read 229 local shop ads in the example market, and Chapter 8 goes back to it for ad copy.
Keyword Planner Reads a Competitor's Website, Not Its Business. A Tire-Heavy Site Returned a List That Was 98.6% Tires.
Next comes the competitor's website. Keyword Planner has a "Start with a website" option: paste in any site and Google suggests keywords based on what's on it. Pick your metro area as the location first; leave it blank and every number in the list is a national one.
We ran twelve example-market shop sites through it, plus a seed list of our own, for 13 pulls and 51,268 keyword ideas. Three patterns came out of it:
- General repair shops all look alike to Keyword Planner. Six general-repair sites returned the same handful of top ideas, variants of "mechanic near me" and "auto repair near me." The useful differences sat further down the list, in the service and make searches.
- A tire-heavy site reads as a tire shop. One shop that sells tires and does full repair returned a list that was 98.6% tire ideas, even though it has a dozen repair and maintenance pages. A tire chain's store page did the same.
- A dealer site reads as a car lot. The dealership's service pages sit inside a sales site, and 61.6% of its ideas were about buying a car.
That middle layer is where a shop's list gets built. Some of what the example market's pulls held: "transmission repair" and "car ac repair," 1,900 local searches a month apiece (transmission topping out at $12.57); "diesel repair" and "brake repair near me," 1,000 each (diesel up to $12.76); "subaru repair," 260, with a top bid of $20.79. None of those are the big generic searches, and every one of them names a job a shop either does or doesn't do.
The fix for the last two is to seed Keyword Planner with words instead of a website: "brake repair," "timing belt replacement," "subaru repair." Then run your own site through it too. If your shop lives on brake jobs and Keyword Planner reads your site as a tire store, fix the website before you fix the ads.
"AC Repair Near Me" Is Usually a House, Not a Car. Its Bids Show It.
The AC problem isn't a Portland quirk. National numbers tell the same story. "Ac repair near me": 201,000 US searches a month, top-of-page range $13.98 to $100.00. "Car ac repair near me": 74,000, range $2.02 to $7.30. The bigger search costs many times more because a different industry is buying it.
Home AC searches turned up in three of our 13 pulls. The rule is short. Every AC keyword in a repair account keeps a car word in it: car, auto, vehicle. "Auto ac repair," "car ac recharge," "car ac blowing hot air." The house versions, "ac repair near me," "air conditioner repair," "furnace," go on the negative list on day one.
Chain Names Carried 369,320 Monthly Searches in Our Lists. Those Drivers Already Picked a Shop.
The home AC searches are the most expensive mistake on the list. They're not the biggest. Here's what else the 13 pulls handed us:
- Chain and brand names: 1,350 ideas in six of the 13 pulls, carrying 369,320 monthly searches between them. Les Schwab, Jiffy Lube, Firestone, Midas and the rest. Someone searching "jiffy lube near me" has already chosen.
- Body shops and collision: 1,041 ideas in eight of the 13 pulls. Different business, different insurance work, different customer.
- Garage doors: searches like "garage repairs near me" showed up in seven of the 13 pulls, with top-of-page bids reaching $76.49. They read like car repair and aren't.
Write that negative as "garage door," not "garage." Plenty of repair shops have the word in their own name, Green Drop Garage among the example shops, and a negative on "garage" alone would block drivers searching for them.
- Free and cheap: 750 ideas, in all 13 pulls. "Cheap car repair shops," "free mechanic," "free transmission repair."
- Jobs, schools and do-it-yourself: smaller, but in eight of the 13 pulls. "Auto repair jobs hiring near me," "auto repair how to."
Competitor names belong on the negative list. Seeding from rivals' sites drags them in, and broad match drags in many more later. Bidding on a rival's name is a separate campaign with separate rules, and it's a call a shop makes deliberately and seldom. Chain names left sitting in a brake ad group are just leaks.
Five Brake Keywords Make a Better Ad Group Than Fifty Repair Searches Lumped Together
What survives the cut gets organized. Each ad group holds five or six close keywords about one service or one make, built the way Chapter 4 laid out. A brake ad group might hold "brake repair near me," "brake repair," "brake pad replacement," "brake service near me" and "brake shop." A Subaru group holds Subaru searches and nothing else.
Isolation, our label for the opening campaign rather than anything Google calls it, launches every one of these keywords on exact match and lets a person type each bid. Your shop's name goes into a brand campaign of its own, so the cheap, easy brand clicks don't hide what the service searches really cost.
Don't drop a keyword because its local number looks small. In the example market, Keyword Planner counted roughly 70 monthly searches for "european auto repair" and roughly 260 for "subaru repair." For a shop that does that work, a few dozen searches a month from drivers who name the car can outearn thousands of generic ones. Google says Keyword Planner's search volume figures are rounded, so treat a low number as "some," not "none."
When you set those first bids, Keyword Planner's two numbers help. Google calls the low figure "an approximation of the 20th percentile" of past top-of-page bids for that keyword, and the high figure the 80th. In our experience they're best read as a band, not a quote. Expect real costs to land inside them and drift as your ad and page quality settle in.
Broad Match Buys Searches Your Shop Never Meant to Pay For. The Negative List Is What Stops It.
Exact match in Isolation keeps the list tight on its own. The negative list starts small: the home AC terms, chain names, body shop and collision, garage doors, free and cheap, jobs and do-it-yourself.
It earns its keep later. Exploration, our second campaign, switches on once tracked bookings and calls reach at least 30 a month. It pairs broad match with a target CPA, and broad match goes looking for any search Google judges close enough. That's where it finds valuable searches nobody would list ahead of time. It's also where "ac repair near me" comes back in through a side door.
Treat the search terms report as morning reading for Exploration's first 30 days. Anything that isn't a car you'd fix goes on the list that day. Google gives negatives their own match types. A broad negative such as "house ac" stops a search that includes both words, wherever they fall. An exact negative stops that one search, word for word, and nothing longer. A shop that wants to block home AC without blocking "car ac repair" uses careful words, such as "furnace" and "house ac," rather than a negative on "ac" alone.
Building and policing this list is part of every account our Google Ads management team runs.
Next: Some Drivers Search the Part, Others the Noise. Exact Match Buys "Brake Repair." Broad Match Finds the Grinding.
With a clean list in tight ad groups, the next question is which searches to launch on and which to leave for broad match. Chapter 6 splits the predictable searches from the long tail of noises, warning lights and odd phrasings drivers actually type.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Auto Repair, a sixteen-chapter guide for independent repair shops in every state.
