Keyword Planner is generous. Hand it one junk removal website and it hands back a thousand searches or more, sorted by volume, each with a bid estimate attached. It looks like a finished keyword list. It isn't.
We seeded Keyword Planner with the 12 junk removal companies we profiled in our example market, Charlotte, North Carolina: five national brands and seven independent haulers, each confirmed as a Search advertiser. Together they returned 9,132 unique keyword ideas. Every one of the 12 sites came back with searches containing "free." Ten came back with some form of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, including all seven independents.
Keyword Planner matches topics, not intentions. A junk removal page that answers "do you take donations?" pulls in donation searches. A page about pricing pulls in "cheap" and "free." The tool can't tell a customer from a bargain hunter, a job seeker or someone looking for a franchise's phone number. Sorting them is your job, and it has to happen before the account goes live.
Google's Preview Tool Shows Who Bids on a Junk Search Without Costing You a Click
Before you build a list, find out who you're bidding against. Inside your Google Ads account, under Tools, sits a free window onto the auction: Ad preview and diagnosis. Pick a search, pick a town, and it draws the page a local searcher would see. Google prefers it to plain searching because a peek through the tool never registers as an impression on your own ad. Pick the zip code where your trucks run the most jobs, try "junk removal near me" and "couch removal," and write down every hauler that shows up.
Two rules while you're there. Never click a competitor's ad; it costs them money, tells you nothing, and isn't how you want to win. And don't read one preview as the whole market. Ads rotate by hour, device and budget.
Look at the whole page, not just the ads. On junk searches, the map listings showed up on 11 of the 20 searches we ran in our example market, and Local Services Ads can appear too, since Google lists "Junk removal services" as one of its Local Services categories. Our search scraper couldn't see the ads themselves, which is exactly why the preview tool and the Transparency Center are the better way to see who's paying. Those are covered in Chapter 12; for now, note which names keep showing up in every spot. They're the haulers your ads will be compared with.
For a fuller picture, Google's Ads Transparency Center lists every ad an advertiser has run. In our example market, only 8 of the 37 local hauler and dumpster websites we checked had run a Search ad in the previous 90 days. The national brands were busier than any one name suggests: College HUNKS, Junk King, The Junkluggers and JDog each ran their ads through 10 to 14 separate franchise-owner accounts. A local hauler isn't bidding against "1-800-GOT-JUNK." It's bidding against whichever owner holds that territory.
Keyword Planner Reads a Competitor's Website and Hands Back Its Customers' Searches
Once you know who's bidding, borrow their research. In Keyword Planner, choose "Start with a website," enter a competitor's address, and Google returns searches tied to what that site talks about. Before you hit enter, narrow the area to the towns your crews will actually drive to; otherwise the numbers describe America, not your phone.
The location setting changes everything about the numbers. Across the US, "junk removal" draws about 135,000 searches a month. In Charlotte, our example market, the same two words show 2,900 searches, and the tool's estimate for a top spot runs from $3.36 up to $18.42. That range is an estimate drawn from past auctions; in our experience, real costs land within about 30% either side of it once the account is running, which is good enough to plan with and not good enough to promise anyone.
Then do the same with your own site. It's the fastest way to see your business through Google's eyes. If your site comes back full of dumpster sizes and moving tips while your trucks mostly haul couches, the site is telling Google something your ads will have to fight.
Seed with several competitors, not one. Our 12 sites returned anywhere from 161 to 2,583 ideas each. Together the lists held 18,084 ideas, of which 9,132 were unique, so each extra seed still added searches the others missed. A franchise site with a page for every item returns a different list from an independent's one-page site, and both have searches the other misses.
Every Competitor Site We Fed Keyword Planner Came Back With "Free." Ten Came Back With 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
Here's what came back across the 9,132 ideas that isn't a paying customer. A keyword can land in more than one group.
- Free, cheap and donation searches: 597. "Free junk removal near me," "cheap junk removal," "donate furniture pickup." Every seed returned some.
- Franchise names: 586. "1800 got junk," "1 800 junk removal," "gotjunk," "i got junk," "hunks that move junk." Ten of 12 seeds returned 1-800-GOT-JUNK variants alone.
- City and dump searches: 332. "Bulky item pickup," "bulk trash pickup," landfill and dump questions.
- Dumpster rental: 1,720, nearly all of it (1,617) from the one dumpster company's site.
- Movers in other cities: 94, pulled in by franchise sites that also move furniture.
- Jobs and business searches: 29. "Junk removal jobs," "junk removal hiring," "start a junk removal business."
That's the trap. Sorted by volume, those searches sit right at the top of the list, with healthy-looking numbers next to them. Add them as keywords and the account pays for people who want the city to come for free, people looking for a franchise's phone number, and people looking for a job on your truck.
1-800-GOT-JUNK Belongs on Your Negative List, Not in an Ad Group
Someone typing "1800 got junk" wants 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Showing them your ad is paying to interrupt a decision they've already made. Rival haulers' names sit on the negative list. If a hauler ever decides to chase a franchise's searchers, that's a separate campaign built on purpose, and most never should.
Negative keywords follow their own rules, and Google spells them out:
- Add synonyms and singular and plural versions yourself. A negative for "junk king" doesn't cover "junk kings."
- Misspellings and capitalization are handled automatically. You don't need "1800 got jnk."
- Negatives don't stretch to close variants. A negative blocks the words you typed, so "got junk" won't catch "gotjunk" written as one word. List both.
A starter list from our own pull: "1800 got junk," "1 800 junk," "1800junk," "gotjunk," "i got junk," "got junk near me," "you got junk." The same goes for "free junk removal," "free junk removal near me," and the job searches.
There's also the legal side of franchise names. Google's trademark policy doesn't restrict using a trademark as a keyword, but it does restrict using one in ad text from a competitor once the owner complains, and it restricts any use that's confusing or misleading. A hauler that bids on a franchise's name is paying for clicks it mostly won't win, then writing ads that can't mention why it bid.
"Cheap" is the one judgment call. A hauler that sells on price, with a published minimum and no surprises, may want "cheap junk removal" in an ad group with an honest price on the page. A hauler that doesn't should add it as a negative. Either is fine. Leaving it to chance isn't.
A Furniture Ad Group Needs Five or Six Searches, Not 641
Strip out the free searches, the franchise names, the city pickup questions, the job hunters and the out-of-town movers, and what's left is the real list. Sorted by item, our example pull looked like this:
- Furniture: 641 ideas
- Yard waste and debris: 545
- Appliances: 387
- Mattresses: 260
- Construction debris: 242
- Hot tubs: 85
- Garages, attics and basements: 68
- Estate and hoarding cleanouts: 52
Each item becomes an ad group, the way Chapter 4 laid out, with five or six of its strongest, most specific searches. They go live in exact match inside Isolation, BrandRocket's term for the opening campaign of exact-match keywords with hand-set bids. You don't need all 641 furniture ideas. You need the five or six that name the job and carry real volume, and you'll find the rest later.
Here's what that looks like for furniture in our example market. Monthly searches from Keyword Planner: "furniture removal" 720, "furniture removal near me" 170, "couch removal" 90, "sofa removal" 90, "old furniture removal" 70, "furniture removal charlotte" 40. Notice that "couch removal" and "sofa removal" show the same 90, and both "near me" versions show 170. Keyword Planner often groups close variants under one number, so those aren't separate pools of customers; they're the same people typing slightly different words. Keep the variants as keywords, but don't add their volumes together when you size the ad group.
Your own company name doesn't go in any of these. It gets a small brand campaign of its own, which is usually the cheapest traffic in the account and keeps a rival from sitting above you when a past customer looks you up.
Dumpster searches are their own decision. If you rent dumpsters, they belong in a separate campaign with its own budget and page, which is Chapter 15. If you don't, they go on the negative list today. A homeowner searching for a 20-yard roll-off is planning to do the loading, and that's the opposite of what you sell.
The Negative List Is Never Finished. Broad Match Will Find New "Free" Searches Daily.
In Isolation, exact match keeps the negative list short, because the account only shows for searches you wrote down. That changes with Exploration. It's our label for the second campaign: broad match, a target cost per booking, switched on after the hauler is logging around 30 quality conversions a month. Broad match goes looking for related searches on its own, and some of them will look like the ones you just cut: "free couch removal" is a real search in our pull, and broad match will find its cousins along with franchise names you never thought of.
For its first month, give Exploration a morning ritual. Pull up the list of what people really typed, spot the freeloaders and franchise hunters, and block them before the trucks roll. Ten minutes and a coffee decide whether broad match brings you couches or burns the budget on curiosity.
Rather hand off the sorting and the daily weeding? Our Google Ads management covers both for junk removal accounts.
Next: "Junk Removal Near Me" Is the Search You Can Predict. The Rest Are Broad Match's Job.
With a clean list, organized by item and live in exact match, Chapter 6 covers the searches you can't predict: the garage cleanouts, yard piles and estate jobs people describe in their own words, and when to let broad match go find them. For the item ad groups these keywords fill, see Chapter 4.
You're reading Chapter 5 of Google Ads for Junk Removal, sixteen chapters written for haulers in every state.
