Twelve remodelers, builders and design-build firms were buying Google ads in our example market, Raleigh-Durham. We handed each of their web addresses to Google's Keyword Planner, set to that metro, and let it guess what each company sells. Keyword Planner handed back 17,596 keyword ideas (12,905 once the overlap between sites is removed).
Some of what came back was gold. A lot of it wasn't. A luxury custom builder's site came back with more than a third of its ideas about houses for sale, neighborhoods and the Parade of Homes. A design-build firm's site came back with tiny houses for sale, at 2,400 searches a month. A company that sells bathrooms, windows, doors and flooring came back with 1,396 door, window and flooring ideas out of 1,515, even though the ad we saw from it was for bathrooms.
Keyword Planner reads a website for what's on it, not for what you want to sell. That's why the most important step in keyword research isn't finding searches. It's sorting them. This chapter walks through how we build a contractor's keyword list from scratch: see who's bidding, mine their websites and your own, sort every idea into an ad group for one project, and throw out the rest before it costs anything.
Google's Preview Tool Shows the Remodelers Bidding on "Kitchen Remodel," No Click Required.
Start by looking at the auction you're about to enter. Google built a tool for exactly this job and tucked it in the Tools menu: Ad Preview and Diagnosis. It lets you look at a results page, ads and all, and your test search never touches anyone's impression numbers. Type the searches homeowners in your area use, like "kitchen remodel" or "home addition contractor," and note whose ads come back.
Skip the old habit of typing the search on your phone and tapping the other remodeler's ad. That tap bills them, teaches you nothing the preview didn't, and in a market where every contractor knows every other one, it's a poor look.
Write down the companies that show up. Next, take that list of names to Google's Ads Transparency Center, the public archive of every advertiser's ads. Of the 71 local residential firms we looked up for the example market, 33 had Search ads in the past 90 days. A fair number ran them on an owner's or an agency's account instead of under the company name, so search both. Their websites are your raw material for the next step.
Keyword Planner Reads a Contractor's Whole Website, Houses for Sale and Tiny Homes Included.
Keyword Planner has a start-from-a-website option. Give it a rival remodeler's web address, point the location at your metro, and run it. Keyword Planner comes back with hundreds or thousands of searches it thinks are related, with monthly searches and a bid range for each. Do the same for three or four competitors. Then do it for your own site. Seeing your site through Google's eyes is often the most useful pull of the bunch, because it shows you what Google thinks you sell.
Here's what the 12 example-market pulls looked like once we classified every idea by a written rule:
- About 61% were residential searches a contractor could use: a project ("kitchen remodel"), a hire ("bathroom remodel contractors near me"), a cost question or a custom builder.
- 2,287 were do-it-yourself questions, design ideas and house plans, led by tiny houses.
- 1,784 belonged to a single trade, like front doors and French doors.
- 1,282 were generic "contractor" and "construction company" searches with no project in them, the mixed crowd from Chapter 4.
- 337 named a specific company or brand.
- 286 were homes for sale, products and software, led by "homes for sale in raleigh north carolina" at 4,400 a month.
- 190 were off-topic, 94 commercial and 26 about jobs, classes or licensing.
The share that was usable ranged from almost nothing for the window-and-door company's site to about 85% for a kitchen-and-bath remodeler's. The difference wasn't the market. It was the website. A whole-site pull reads every page, so a builder with a homes-for-sale section, a firm with a tiny-house page or a company that sells windows gets Keyword Planner's best guess at all of it.
One more thing to watch while you read the list: Keyword Planner shows close variants as separate rows with the same number. In the example market, eight different phrasings of "kitchen remodel contractor," from "kitchen reno contractors" to "contractor for kitchen renovation," each show 590 searches a month. That's one group of searchers, not 4,720. Count it once.
Every Search Goes Into an Ad Group for One Project, or It Goes Out.
Now sort. Every idea you keep goes into an ad group for exactly one project: kitchens, bathrooms, additions, basements, whole-home renovations, and outdoor living if you build decks and porches. Each group holds a tight set of searches, about five or six, that one ad and one page can answer. On launch day each group runs on exact match inside Isolation, the hand-bid starting campaign we've been building since Chapter 1.
Here's what a kitchen group looks like, built from the example-market pull:
Six keywords, three groups of searchers. The top-of-page range for "kitchen remodel near me" runs $6.94 to $38.07 in the example market, against $4.20 to $25.53 for "kitchen remodel." The "near me" searchers are worth more to other contractors, which is worth knowing when Chapter 7 sets the bids.
Repeat that sort for every project you actually sell. In the example market, the top search in each group gives you a feel for the sizes: "bathroom remodel" near 1,000 searches monthly, "deck builder near me" about 720, "kitchen remodel" 480, "home addition contractor" 260 and "basement finishing contractors" 140. Baths draw the most searches and the stiffest bidding, with top-of-page bids running $14.65 to $60.00. Additions draw fewer searches and lighter bidding, $3.28 to $13.43, for a job worth several bathrooms. Small groups are fine. A group exists because a project deserves its own ad and its own page, not because it clears a volume bar.
Two piles from the sort need a decision rather than a reflex.
The generic "contractor" searches. The 1,282 ideas like "general contractors near me" have real volume, but Chapter 4 showed who else types them: people looking for contractor work, commercial buyers, people asking about pay. Our call for a new residential account is to leave them out of the launch. Once the project groups are producing booked estimates, they can get an ad group of their own, pointed at a page that explains what kind of work you do and don't do, with negatives such as "jobs," "salary," "commercial" and "license" already in place.
The single-trade searches. The 1,784 door, window, roofing and siding ideas are noise for a kitchen-and-bath remodeler and real work for a full-service general contractor who replaces windows as part of a renovation. Keep only the trades you'd happily send a crew to do on their own, and put the rest on the negative list.
Searches for your own company name don't go in any of these groups. They run in a brand campaign of their own, so they never compete with your project ad groups for budget and never muddy what each group is learning.
Competitor Names and "Cheap" Searches Become Negatives Before the First Click.
Whatever doesn't make the cut is a candidate for negative keywords: the words that tell Google to keep your ads off a search entirely. Two piles deserve attention before launch.
Other companies' names. The pulls held 337 ideas naming a specific company or brand: other remodelers, bath franchises, lead sites, product brands. Add them as negatives. A homeowner searching for another remodeler by name wants that remodeler. Running ads on competitor names is a separate campaign with its own risks, and it's rarely where a contractor's money should go first.
Cheap, free and do-it-yourself. 233 ideas in the pulls carried "cheap," "free" or "DIY." Those people are telling you, in their own words, that they aren't hiring you.
Google's negative keywords work differently from your regular keywords in one way that trips people up: they don't stretch to close variants. If you add "cheap" as a negative, Google's help page says you also need to add the plural and any synonyms you want blocked. Capitalization and misspellings are handled for you.
Keep these in a shared negative keyword list rather than typing them into each campaign. Google lets you build one list and apply it to every campaign that needs it, so when Exploration and later campaigns arrive, the competitor names, the do-it-yourself crowd and the trades you don't do are already blocked on day one.
And the list is never done. Negatives matter most once Exploration launches, the broad match campaign we add after Isolation proves what converts. Broad match finds searches nobody would think to write down, including plenty you'd never want. For the first month Exploration runs, somebody opens the search terms report every single morning and blocks the junk the day it shows up.
A last word on the bid ranges Keyword Planner shows. Google describes the low and high top-of-page figures as rough 20th- and 80th-percentile marks of what advertisers have paid in your location. Treat them like a supplier's ballpark before the material list is final: in our experience the real figure can land roughly 30% above or below.
If you'd rather have the list built and kept clean for you, our Google Ads management does this research for every contractor account before launch.
Next: 108 Searches Out of 6,256 Get 100 or More a Month. That's Where Isolation Starts.
Chapter 6 takes the finished list and decides which searches go live first: the small set you can name with confidence, and the long tail that broad match will find later.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Contractors, our sixteen-chapter guide for residential general contractors and construction companies anywhere in the US.
