Every cleaning company that has run Google Ads for a while has already done most of your keyword research. It's sitting on their website, and Google will read it to you for free.
That's the heart of this chapter. You point Google's Keyword Planner at a competing cleaner's site, it hands back the searches it connects to that business, and you sort what comes back into the service groups Chapter 4 set up. The sorting is where most accounts go wrong, because a cleaning company shares its vocabulary with dry cleaners, job seekers, carpet-machine shoppers and people who want a checklist so they can do it themselves.
Google Will Show You Who Bids on "House Cleaning Near Me" in Your City, Free
First job: learn who's already in the auction. Inside your Google Ads account sits a free Ad preview and diagnosis tool. Choose a city and a search, and the tool draws the results page a customer there would get. Your ads' impression counts stay untouched. Type "house cleaning near me," "maid service" and "deep cleaning service," set the location to your market, and look at who shows up in the ads.
Don't search on your phone and click the ads you find. Clicking a competitor's ad costs them money, tells you nothing the preview tool doesn't, and muddies your own market research with clicks that were never real.
In our example market, Seattle, the companies running Google Search ads for cleaning fell into three groups (we checked each in Google's public Ads Transparency Center). National franchises: Molly Maid, Merry Maids, The Maids and MaidPro all run Search ads. Marketplaces and booking apps: Thumbtack, Angi, TaskRabbit and Homeaglow. And a layer of local independents, from a green cleaning company to a commercial janitorial firm. Your market will have its own names. The mix is likely to look familiar.
Write down the independents and the regional companies that sell what you sell. Those websites are your seeds.
For a second free look, Google's Ads Transparency Center lets anyone search an advertiser's name or website and see the ads it has run, where and roughly when. It won't show bids or results, but it confirms who is actually spending money on search in your area, and it becomes a gold mine of competitor ad copy when Chapter 8 gets to writing your own.
A Competing Cleaner's Website Is an Unlocked Filing Cabinet of Searches
In Keyword Planner, choose "Discover new keywords," switch to starting with a website, and paste in a competitor's address. Pick your own metro as the location; national numbers describe customers your crews will never drive to. Back comes a long list of searches Google ties to that business, each with a monthly count and a price range for the top of the page.
We did this for twelve Seattle-area cleaning companies that advertise on Google, from independents to franchises to booking platforms. After removing duplicates, they gave us 27,779 unique keyword ideas. That's far more than any cleaning company needs, and most of it isn't yours, which is the point of the next three sections. But buried in it are the phrasings real customers use: "house cleaning service tacoma," "move out cleaning services," "deep cleaning service," "janitorial service near me," and dozens of neighborhood and suburb versions you'd never think to type.
Then do the same with your own website. If Keyword Planner reads your site and hands back carpet shampooers and dry cleaning, that's what Google's ad system thinks you are too, and Chapter 4's service pages are the fix.
"Dry Cleaners Near Me" Outsearches House Cleaning Five to One. None of It Is Yours.
Here's what the weeds looked like in those 27,779 ideas, by kind. Your market's counts will differ; the kinds won't.
- Dry cleaners and laundry. In the Seattle market, "cleaners near me" draws about 1,900 searches a month and is a house cleaning search. "Dry cleaners near me" draws about 9,900, five times as many, and every one of those people has a suit, not a kitchen. We found 211 dry cleaning, laundry and clothing ideas in the pull.
- Job seekers. 1,969 ideas contained a job word: jobs, hiring, careers, salary, apply. Some outsearch the customer version of the same words. In the example market, 590 people a month searched for janitorial jobs near them, against 170 who searched for a janitorial service.
- Products and machines. 595 ideas were about buying or renting equipment: "bissell carpet cleaner" at 1,300, "carpet shampooer" at 880, carpet machine rentals.
- Apparel. Seeding one commercial franchise's site pulled in 1,708 ideas about overalls and workwear, because the brand name is also a word for clothing.
- Price shoppers. 1,905 ideas were about cost or price. A few, like "cheapest house cleaning services near me," carry real bids, which makes them a business decision rather than an automatic negative.
- Do-it-yourselfers. Checklists, schedules and how-to searches, which Chapter 2 showed are big and cheap because nobody hiring types them.
- Future competitors. A few dozen ideas, like "cleaning services how to start" and "commercial cleaning franchise," come from people planning to open a cleaning business, not hire one.
Sort the pile the way you'd sort laundry: darks and whites never go in the same load. The hire searches go forward. The rest become negative keywords, words that stop your ad from showing when they appear in a search. "Dry," "laundry," "jobs," "hiring," "salary," "rental," "machine" and "checklist" are the obvious first ones. "Cheap" and "free" join them unless you've decided to sell on price.
Every Franchise and App Name Keyword Planner Hands Back Belongs on the Negative List
Seed Keyword Planner with competitors' sites and it returns their names. In the Seattle market, "homeaglow" draws about 2,400 searches a month, "the maids" about 1,600, the "molly maid" variants about 1,300, and "merry maids" and "servicemaster" about 590 each.
Those are people looking for a specific company. Someone who typed "molly maid" wants Molly Maid. Paying to show them your ad mostly buys you clicks from people who meant to go somewhere else, and in a new account, those clicks teach Google the wrong customer.
So competitor names go on the negative list by default. They'll come back again, in larger numbers, once broad match is running, because broad match loves a brand name. Bidding on a rival cleaner's name on purpose is a different project, one that lives in its own campaign with its own spending limit. For most cleaning companies the answer is not yet, and maybe never.
Your own company name is the opposite. People searching it are the most likely to book, it's cheap, and it goes in its own brand campaign where it can't hide inside the service groups.
Five or Six Keywords per Cleaning Service Beat One Ad Group Holding Everything
What's left after the weeding is the real list, and it's shorter than you'd expect. Sort it into the service groups from Chapter 4: recurring house cleaning, deep cleaning, move-out and move-in, and commercial or office cleaning if you sell it. Each group gets about five or six close keywords.
That's enough because Keyword Planner lumps near-identical phrasings together. In the Seattle market, "house cleaning seattle" shares its 2,400 monthly searches with ten look-alikes such as "cleaning services seattle" and "seattle house cleaning." Adding all eleven doesn't find eleven times the people. A handful of distinct phrasings per service covers the volume; the rest is noise in your reports.
Two more notes on reading the numbers:
- Bid ranges are rough. Each idea comes with two price columns, the low and high end of what Google expects the top of the page to cost. Treat them as a starting estimate, not a quote. Our rule of thumb is that real prices can land about 30% either side once your ads are live, and your Quality Score from Chapter 4 moves them further.
- Small numbers still count. A search with 30 or 50 monthly searches in your market can still be worth a group if it's exactly what you sell. In the example market, "recurring cleaning service" pulled only about 30 searches a month, yet its bid range sat near the top of every residential service.
At launch, every one of these keywords runs in exact match only: the Isolation campaign, BrandRocket's name for a first campaign that buys only the searches you listed, with bids you set by hand. Chapter 6 explains why the bigger, unpredictable searches wait.
Broad Match Brings New Job Seekers and Dry Cleaners Every Week. The Negative List Has to Keep Up.
A negative keyword list is never finished, and it gets busiest the day broad match starts. Exploration, BrandRocket's broad-match campaign, only starts once about 30 quality conversions a month prove what a customer looks like. From then on it hunts phrasings you never listed. Many of them are gold. Plenty are job seekers, dry cleaners and people shopping for a mop.
Google's own rules make the list a little more work than you'd hope. Negative keywords don't automatically cover close variants, so a negative for "job" won't block "jobs," and a negative for "dry cleaner" won't block "dry cleaning." Google says to add the singular, plural and synonym versions yourself. Misspellings and capitalization are handled for you.
Google lets you save negatives as a shared list and attach it to several campaigns. Build one for the whole account, so blocking "laundry" once blocks it in the recurring, deep, move-out and office campaigns alike. For the first month after Exploration launches, open the search terms report every single day. Anything that isn't a customer for a service you sell becomes a negative that day. After the first month, keep it on a regular schedule; the list keeps growing as long as broad match runs.
The job-seeker list deserves special care in cleaning. Your recruiting ads, which get their own campaign in Chapter 14, want exactly those searches. The service campaigns want none of them. Keeping the two apart is how both work.
Next: The Searches You Can't Predict Are Where Cleaning Accounts Grow
With a clean list sorted by service and a negative list standing guard, the account can launch on the searches you know. Chapter 6 covers the other half: the long, specific searches no keyword tool predicts, and why they're where a cleaning account finds most of its growth once exact match has done its job.
Earlier chapters: counting every call, text and booking, where cleaning customers search, what a recurring customer is worth and one page per service. All sixteen are on the guide's home page.
In our Google Ads management for cleaning companies, the negative list is built before the first keyword goes live, and it gets longer every week after.
