We took the websites of 12 electrical contractors that advertise on Google in our example market, Columbus, Ohio, and fed each one into Google's Keyword Planner. The planner reads a site and suggests the searches it thinks that business could show up for. Between them, the 12 sites produced 10,257 search ideas.
About half of them were for plumbers and furnace repair.
That's not a quirk of one market. It's how the tool works, and it's the first thing to understand before you build a keyword list from your competitors. Keyword Planner tells you what a competitor's website is about. If that competitor also fixes toilets and air conditioners, so does your list. This chapter walks through the method we use to find an electrician's keywords, where it goes wrong, and what to cut before a single dollar is spent. Your market's competitors will be different. The process is the same anywhere.
Google Will Show You Who's Bidding Before You Spend a Dollar
Start by looking at who's already paying for the searches you care about. Inside your account, Google's ad preview tool lets you type a search and a town and see the ads that would appear there; Google built it so the look doesn't count as an impression for anyone. Type "electrician near me," set the location to your town, and you'll see which companies are bidding there today.
Do it there, not with a live search on your phone. Clicking a competitor's ad from a real search costs them money and skews your own read of the market, and it's a bad habit to start an ad account with.
For a second look, Google's Ads Transparency Center lists the ads a business has run. In our example market it confirmed search ads from local electricians, both national electrical franchises, and seven of the eight multi-trade home-service companies we checked. Those advertisers are your seed list.
Keyword Planner Turns a Competitor's Website Into Its Search Terms
One of Keyword Planner's two doors starts from a web address rather than a word list, and the address doesn't have to be yours. Here's the routine:
- Paste in a competitor electrician's website. You can have the planner read the whole site or just one page.
- Pin the location to the metro your trucks drive, so the volumes and bids describe homeowners you could actually reach.
- Read the numbers loosely. Monthly searches are averages, and close variants of a phrase are grouped under one number. The top-of-page bid range is a historical estimate, not a quote. Our rule of thumb is to treat it as plus or minus 30%.
- Repeat with your own website. Plenty of electricians learn their own site reads to Google like a lighting store or a generator dealer.
Repeat it for each of your main competitors. Most of what comes back will be useful. A lot of it won't, and the next section is about the biggest source of the second kind.
Three Multi-Trade Competitors' Sites Came Back 96% Plumbing and HVAC Searches
The 12 example sites didn't contribute equally to the noise. Nine of them are electrical contractors that sell electrical work and little else. Three are home-service companies that sell electrical, plumbing and heating-and-cooling under one name.
The split was almost total. Each of the three multi-trade sites returned between 96% and 97% plumbing and heating-and-cooling ideas: "plumbers columbus ohio," "furnace repair near me," "ac repair near me." The nine electrical-only sites returned 1% or less. Across all twelve, about 5,000 of the 10,257 ideas were plumbing or heating-and-cooling searches.
It even shows up in the emergency searches. In the example market's planner data, "plumber emergency near me" draws about 720 searches a month, while "emergency electrician near me" draws about 170. Seed with a multi-trade competitor and those plumbing emergencies arrive looking like your business.
The fix isn't to skip multi-trade competitors. They're often the biggest spenders in your auction, so you want to know what they target. Seed them one page at a time instead: their panel upgrade page, their EV charger page, their generator page. That way the planner only reads the electrical part of their site.
The Competitor Sites Returned 1,024 Generator Ideas and 11 for EV Chargers. Your Own Service List Fills the Gap.
Once the plumbing and heating-and-cooling ideas are gone, the rest sort naturally by job. From the example sites:
- General "electrician" searches: 1,856 ideas.
- Generators: 1,024, of which 372 name the Generac brand.
- Commercial work: 157.
- Wiring and rewiring: 150.
- Panels and service upgrades: 141.
- Emergency and 24-hour: 102.
- Lighting: 49. Outlets, switches and GFCIs: 34. Inspections: 20.
- EV chargers: 11.
Look at the bottom of that list. Eleven EV charger ideas, from a market where Keyword Planner shows "ev charger installation" at about 14,800 searches a month nationally. Several of the example sites are generator dealers, so the tool handed back generators by the thousand and almost nothing about chargers. A competitor's website only tells you about the services they push.
So the last step is your own service list. In Keyword Planner's other starting option, type in the jobs you actually do, in the words a homeowner would use: "ev charger installation," "panel upgrade," "whole house surge protector," "knob and tube rewiring." Add what comes back to the pile.
Then build the groups. Each ad group gets one job and about five or six closely related searches, the way Chapter 4 laid out. A panel group in the example market might hold "electric panel upgrade" (about 50 searches a month locally), "electrical panel replacement" and "change out electrical panel" (about 40, and they share one number because Keyword Planner treats them as the same search). Those panel searches then go live inside the first campaign, which we call Isolation: exact match only and a hand-typed bid on each, so day one is spent on phrases that already mean a job. Don't be put off by how small those local numbers look. Fifty or forty searches a month in one metro is normal for a specific electrical job, and each of those searches is a homeowner who has already decided what they need. A handful of tight groups like this, each with a few dozen monthly searches, adds up to a steady stream of jobs. Chasing the biggest number on the list usually means chasing the vaguest search.
The generator pile needs one extra cut before it becomes ad groups. Columbus numbers make the point. "Generac generators" pulls roughly 1,300 searches a month and advertisers pay up to about $6 for it. Meanwhile "generac dealers near me" (about 110) and "generac generator installation" (about 40) are far smaller, and advertisers will pay $10 to $12 to show up for them. The big number is mostly people reading about the brand. The small, pricier ones are people looking for someone to put a unit in. Keep the install and dealer searches, set the research ones aside, and let Chapter 15 cover generators in full.
Competitor Names, Job Seekers and Bargain Hunters Become Negatives Before Launch
The last pass through the list is about what to block. A negative keyword tells Google not to show your ad for searches containing it. Three groups from the example data belong there before launch:
- Competitors' names: 96 searches. "Safe electric," "mister electric," "mr electric columbus ohio" (about 320 a month). Google lets anyone bid on a rival's trademark as a keyword, which is why these show up in a competitor-seeded list. But a homeowner who types a specific company's name has usually already chosen that company. Going after a rival electrician's name should be a choice you make on purpose, funded and tracked apart from everything else, not something that slips in because a planner suggested it. For most electricians, that's a big if.
- Job and license seekers: 124 searches. "Electrician jobs columbus ohio," "electrician license ohio," "job as electrician." These people want a paycheck, not a panel.
- Bargain hunters: 35 searches with "cheap" in them. If you don't compete on lowest price, don't pay for the people who only want it.
Be careful with the obvious-looking ones. "Licensed electrician near me" has the word "licensed" in it, and it's a homeowner looking to hire, not a job seeker. Read every term before it becomes a negative.
Two technical points save money later. Negative keywords don't match close variants or misspellings the way regular keywords do, so a competitor's name needs its common misspellings added too. And your own company name belongs in a separate campaign of its own, the cheapest high-intent search you'll ever buy.
The negative list is never finished at launch. It grows fastest once the account opens up broad match in what we call the Exploration campaign, usually around months two or three, once the account logs about 30 quality conversions a month. That's when Google starts matching you to searches nobody predicted, and the search terms report needs a daily read for the first 30 days. From that report, a single click adds a term as a negative, exact match by default.
Next: Exact Match Covers the Electrical Searches You Can List. Chapter 6 Is About the Bigger Pile Nobody Can.
The list you've built now holds the searches you can predict. Chapter 6 explains why the searches you can't predict are the bigger pile, and how the account reaches them without wasting money. Tracking from Chapter 1 needs to be live before any of this spends, and Chapter 4 shows the ad groups and pages this list is meant to fill.
Every chapter of this guide is collected on the guide's home page.
When we run Google Ads management for an electrical contractor, the keyword list is rebuilt from scratch, seeded one competitor page at a time. Running your own? Put your biggest multi-trade competitor's home page into Keyword Planner and count how many of the first 50 ideas are for plumbers.
