One homeowner types "electrician westerville ohio." Another types "residential electrician near me." A third types "upgrade to 200 amp service," and a fourth types "hot tub electrician." Every one of them wants an electrician at the house, and no electrician would think to write all four into a keyword list.
That's the problem this chapter is about. In our example market, Columbus, Ohio, Keyword Planner listed 4,593 different searches from people trying to hire an electrician, after we'd removed plumbing, heating and cooling, job hunting, do-it-yourself questions and company names. Fewer than 100 of them come up often enough to bid on one at a time.
So the account needs two different tools: one for the searches you can name, and one for the much longer list you can't. This method uses both, in a set order. Your market's numbers will differ. The shape won't.
Exact Match Covers the Searches That Repeat. In One Metro, That's Fewer Than 100.
Here's how those 4,593 hiring searches break down by monthly volume in the example market:
- 50 or more searches a month: 96.
- 20 to 40: 190.
- About 10: 2,738.
- Too few for Google to report a number: 1,569.
The top group is where an account starts. These are the phrases you already know mean a job: "electrician near me," "emergency electrician," "electrical panel upgrade," your service plus your town. They go into the first campaign, which we call Isolation: exact match only, with you setting each bid by hand.
Exact match is narrower than its name suggests in one useful way. Google matches an exact keyword to searches with the same meaning, including close variants such as plurals and misspellings, and there's no switch to turn that off. So "electrician near me" also catches "electricians near me." What it won't do is reach for a search with a different meaning. That's exactly what you want at launch, when every dollar should land on a search that already means a job.
The town searches deserve a decision at this stage too. A few of them are big enough to earn their own exact keyword. In the example market, "electrician newark ohio" and "electrician chillicothe ohio" each show about 110 searches a month, and "westerville electrician" about 90. If you serve those towns, those three belong in Isolation, in an ad group whose ad and page name the town. The other 60 or so town searches are too small to manage one by one. They're the first job you'll hand to broad match.
Town Names, Specific Jobs and Odd Wordings Make Up Thousands of Searches Nobody Would List
The 4,497 searches below that top group look like a mess, but they follow patterns.
Towns. 64 of them pair "electrician" with one of 22 towns and suburbs around the metro: "electrician newark ohio" and "electrician chillicothe ohio" (about 110 a month each), "westerville electrician" (about 90), "electrician hilliard ohio" (about 50), and dozens more at 10 or 20. A homeowner types the town they live in, not the city you list on your website.
Specific jobs. "Hot tub electrician." "Upgrade to 200 amp service." "Generator installers." "Commercial electrical contractors columbus ohio." Each one is a real job, and each one gets a handful of searches a month.
Odd wordings. "Electrician in my area." "Electrician residential near me." "Home electrician." Nobody on your crew would phrase it that way. Homeowners do.
One honest limit on all of this. Keyword Planner only lists searches it has data for, and even the 1,569 too small to report are just the ones it chose to show. There are certainly more it never lists at all. Within the list it does show, the 96 bigger searches carry most of the measured volume. So the case for reaching further isn't that the small searches add up to more traffic than the big ones in this list. It's that they exist by the thousand, each one a real homeowner, and no keyword list can name them.
Broad Match With Smart Bidding Is How the Account Reaches Searches You Can't List
We call the second campaign Exploration. Clone the Isolation campaign, then trim the clone down until only your best performers remain, usually no more than five keywords that have put the most trucks in driveways. Every one of them runs on broad match. Instead of you setting each bid, it uses Google's Maximize Conversions strategy with a target cost per conversion, taken from what Isolation's leads have actually cost, as the guardrail.
With broad match, an ad for "panel upgrade" can appear on "upgrade to 200 amp service" or "old fuse box replacement," searches that are about the same job without sharing the words. Google judges the connection from more than the keyword itself: what the homeowner searched before, what your page says, and which other keywords live in that ad group. That's why the tight ad groups from Chapter 4 matter so much here. A broad keyword sitting next to five EV install keywords and an EV install page tells Google a lot about which searches you want.
Google's own match-type guidance calls Smart Bidding essential to broad match, and it's not hedging.
The target itself shouldn't be a guess. With a few months of tracked conversions behind it, Google recommends basing a target cost per conversion on the account's average from the last 30 days, and judging the results once it has at least 30 conversions to work from. Set it too low and Google will simply buy fewer leads. In practice that means Exploration starts with a target close to what Isolation's leads actually cost, not the number you wish they cost. Give it its own budget, too, so that broad match can't drain the money Isolation needs for the searches you already know pay. Without automated bidding judging each search by its odds of converting, broad match buys traffic it can't sort.
Timing is the part most accounts get wrong. Exploration launches once the account logs about 30 quality conversions a month: real calls, forms and bookings, counted the way Chapter 1 set up. For most electrical contractors that's around months two or three, and an account with a bigger budget gets there sooner. Launch it before then and Smart Bidding has too little to learn from, so broad match wanders.
Broad Match Spends Yesterday's Money on Searches You Didn't Choose. Read Them Every Morning for a Month.
Every search that actually set off one of your ads sits in a report Google calls search terms. In Exploration's first 30 days, read it every day. Each new search gets one of three verdicts:
- Let it ride. A search like "electrician residential near me" that's clearly a homeowner hiring. Leave it running and watch what it costs.
- Promote it. A search that keeps bringing in jobs, like "hot tub electrician" for a shop that does them, earns its own exact keyword in Isolation, where you control the bid.
- Block it. Add it as a negative keyword. The search terms report can add a term as a negative in a click, and it adds it as an exact negative by default.
Expect four kinds of off-target searches in the first weeks, and you can see each of them coming in the planner data:
- Do-it-yourself questions. Locally, the planner puts "wiring a gfci" and "wiring a 220" at roughly 40 searches apiece. These are homeowners with a screwdriver, not a budget.
- Hardware shoppers. Nationally, "200 amp panels" shows about 8,100 searches a month and "electric car charger for home" about 12,100, with top-of-page estimates of a few dollars. People pricing parts look a lot like people hiring an electrician, until they don't call.
- Outage searches. "Power outage generator" (about 50 a month in the example market) mixes people shopping for a portable generator with people who might want a standby unit installed. Watch what these cost before you decide.
- The usual suspects from Chapter 5.
Expect the same junk Chapter 5 found in the keyword lists, because broad match finds it too. Plumbing emergencies, "electrician jobs," competitors' names and "cheap electrician" searches will all show up in the first weeks. Every one you block is money that goes back to the searches that hire. Block the usual misspellings while you're there: a negative only stops the exact wording you give it, not its cousins.
After the first month, a weekly read is usually enough. Over time, the two campaigns trade places. When Exploration ends up booking the bulk of the work at a price you can live with, Isolation can go quiet for a while. If Exploration starts losing a search you want to own, such as your best town plus your best service, turn Isolation back on for that keyword and take the position back.
Next: An Emergency Click Can Cost More Than Twice a Panel Click. Chapter 7 Bids Each One by What It Brings In.
Nationally, Keyword Planner's top-of-page estimate for "emergency electrician near me" reaches about $64, against about $28 for "electrical panel upgrade." Chapter 7 covers how to set those bids by hand in Isolation, which numbers to watch, and how Isolation's real costs become Exploration's target. Chapter 5 built the keyword list this chapter splits in two.
The full set of sixteen chapters is gathered on the guide's home page.
Electrical contractors who hand us their Google Ads management don't get broad match on day one. It waits until the tracking shows a steady month of real jobs coming in. Doing it yourself? Open last month's search terms and count how many different searches produced a single click. That number is your long tail.
