"We Load & Haul It All." "We handle it all." "We haul everything away, big or small."
Read enough junk removal ads and the same promise keeps coming back. We read 143 ads from the junk removal advertisers we checked in our example market, Charlotte, North Carolina, and 11 of them, from 7 different companies, lead with some version of it. It's a good line for the side of a truck. It tells a neighbor at a stoplight that you'll take whatever they've got.
In a Google Ads account, the same idea turns into something worse: one ad group stuffed with every item you've ever hauled, one ad that talks about everything, and one home page that has to answer every search. Google doesn't grade your company on whether you haul it all. It grades each keyword, each ad and each page, against each search, one auction at a time. A hauler who takes everything still has to show up as the hauler for this couch, this hot tub, this dead refrigerator.
Google Ranks Your Ad Search by Search, Not Company by Company
Google lists six things that set where a junk ad lands, and publishes no formula for combining them: the bid, how good the ad and its page look for this search at this moment, the minimum bar an ad must clear to show at all, how hard the other haulers are competing, the searcher's own situation (where they are, their device, the hour, their exact words), and the expected lift from assets like call buttons. All six are weighed again every time the ad is eligible to show.
That last point is the whole chapter in one sentence. There's no standing rank for "the best junk removal company in town." There's a fresh contest for "hot tub removal near me" at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, another for "couch pickup" an hour later, and another for "old refrigerator disposal" the next morning. A big account with a big budget can lose the hot tub search to a small hauler whose ad says "hot tub" and whose page is about hot tubs.
Being near the top still decides who gets the phone call, since that's where most people tap. And for most junk searches, the cheapest way up the page isn't a bigger bid. It's being the most obvious answer to that one question.
Quality Score Grades Each Keyword on Three Things, and Ad Relevance Is the One You Fix This Week
Google gives every keyword a Quality Score from 1 to 10. Google is careful to say what it is: a diagnostic, a report on how your ad and page compare with other advertisers, and something the auction itself never reads. It's the dashboard light, not the engine. But it points straight at the parts of the engine that are.
It's built from three grades:
- Expected clickthrough rate. Google's forecast of whether people searching that exact keyword will tap your ad. Google adjusts this to remove the effect of ad position and assets, so bidding your way higher or adding call buttons doesn't raise it. What's left is how appealing the ad is for that keyword.
- Ad relevance. Whether your ad talks about the thing the person typed, or about junk in general.
- Landing page experience. Whether the hot tub owner who taps through lands somewhere that talks about hot tubs and how to book one.
Google hands each of the three a simple grade in the keyword report: above, at or below what other advertisers manage. The quickest of the three to fix is ad relevance, and the fix lives in one place: which keywords share an ad group. An ad group with five or six closely related keywords, "hot tub removal," "hot tub disposal," "spa removal," "hot tub haul away," gets an ad that says "Hot Tub Removal" in the headline. An ad group with 60 keywords covering couches, pianos, mattresses and construction debris gets an ad that says "Junk Removal," which is relevant to everything and the best answer to nothing.
Couches, Hot Tubs and Appliances Are Separate Searches With Separate Buyers
The searches themselves tell you how to split the account. US monthly averages from Google's Keyword Planner:
- "furniture removal": 9,900
- "hot tub removal": 6,600
- "mattress disposal": 6,600
- "appliance removal": 5,400
- "couch removal": 2,900
- "piano removal": 880
They don't behave alike, either. "Hot tub removal" runs 12,100 searches in October and November and drops to 1,900 in August. The top-of-page bid ranges differ by item too: $3.60 to $17.02 for "hot tub removal" against $2.80 to $12.42 for "appliance removal." A single catch-all ad group can't hold a separate bid, a separate season or a separate message for each of them. Item ad groups can.
And the people behind them want different things. The hot tub owner needs to know whether you'll cut it apart and haul it from the backyard. The appliance customer wants to know you'll take the old fridge the day the new one arrives. The couch customer is wondering whether the crew will scratch the hallway on the way out. Customers name these items in their own words: couch, sofa, sectional and recliner turn up in 32 of the 719 Google reviews we read, and "furniture" in 43. Those are the words for your headlines and your ad groups.
In the first campaign, Isolation, BrandRocket's name for exact match with hand-set bids, each of those items becomes its own ad group with its own exact-match keywords, its own ad and its own page. Chapter 5 shows how to build the keyword lists and sort out the searches that don't belong.
A Hot Tub Ad Group Is Five Keywords, One Ad and One Page
Here's what one of those ad groups looks like when it's done, using hot tubs as the example.
- Keywords. A handful of exact-match searches that all mean the same job: "hot tub removal," "hot tub disposal," "spa removal," "jacuzzi removal," "hot tub haul away." Keyword Planner often gives close variants like these the same volume figure, so treat them as one pool of searchers, not five.
- Headlines. Up to 15 of them, 30 characters each, and most should say the item: "Hot Tub Removal Today," "We Cut Up and Haul Hot Tubs," "Deck or Backyard, We Get It Out." Use only the claims your crews can actually keep.
- Descriptions. The answers the page gives in full: how hot tubs are priced, how long the job takes, what's included in the haul.
- Final URL. The hot tub page itself, so the person who searched for hot tub removal never has to hunt for it.
- Sitelinks. Links to your other item pages, so the customer who also has an old treadmill sees that you take it.
Repeat that for couches and furniture, appliances, mattresses, garage cleanouts and whatever else your trucks carry most often. It takes an afternoon. It's the single biggest change most junk removal accounts can make before they spend another dollar.
One more thing to check while you're at it: the path your ad displays. Among the example sites, one ad showed a display path ending in /charlotte-nc/junk-removal, and that address returned a "page not found" error when we requested it directly. A display path is text you type into the ad and doesn't have to be a real address, and we didn't follow the ad's own click, so its final page may well have been fine. Still, the customer reads that path as a promise of where they're going. Make the display path, the headline and the page all say the same item, and there's nothing for anyone, customer or Google, to puzzle over.
Two of the Seven Independent Haulers We Checked Have a Page for Couches, Hot Tubs and Appliances
An ad group only works if it has somewhere to send people. So we mapped the websites of the 12 junk removal companies we profiled in our example market and looked for a real service page for each item.
The national brands have them. 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Junk King, The Junkluggers and LoadUp all publish service pages for furniture or couches, appliances and hot tubs, many of them for individual cities. The map of College HUNKS' site came back without item pages, so we can't say either way for that one.
The seven independent haulers are a different story. Junk Doctors and Junk Raider each have a dedicated service page for couches or furniture, hot tubs and appliances. The other five don't. Counting only real service pages, not blog posts or tag pages:
- A page for couches or furniture: 2 of 7.
- A page for appliances: 3 of 7.
- A page for hot tubs: 4 of 7.
So most independent haulers in this sample have nowhere specific to send a couch search. The click lands on a home page that talks about everything, and Google's third grade, landing page experience, reflects that.
A Hot Tub Page Has to Answer Hot Tub Questions
An item page doesn't need to be long. It needs to answer the questions that particular customer is carrying when they tap the ad:
- The item in the heading. "Hot Tub Removal," not "Junk Removal Services."
- What the job involves. Hot tubs are often cut apart and carried out from a deck or backyard; one of the example sites files hot tub removal under its demolition services. For fridges and freezers, federal rules require the refrigerant to be recovered before disposal, so say how you handle it.
- How it's priced. Put a number on it, a from-price, or a plain line about what makes the price go up or down. 1-800-GOT-JUNK publishes its own item averages, $125 for a sofa and $130 for a refrigerator, so customers will arrive with a number in mind.
- What you don't take. Seven of the 12 example sites publish a specific list (paint, chemicals, tires and so on). A page that answers the "do you take this?" question before the call saves both of you a wasted lead.
- Photos of the real job, the arrival window you actually keep, and the phone number on the first screen.
Run the page through Google's PageSpeed Insights while you're at it. A slow page is one more reason for the customer to hit the back button. But speed is the last check, not the first one. A fast page about everything still loses to a page about the one thing the customer searched for.
If you'd rather have the ad groups and the item pages built as a matched set, that's the work our Google Ads management does.
Next: Keyword Planner Hands Every Hauler "Free" Searches and Franchise Names
With ad groups and pages lined up item by item, the next job is filling them with the right keywords. Chapter 5 shows what Keyword Planner hands a junk hauler when you seed it with competitors' sites, and what to throw out before launch. If you need the numbers behind each bid first, Chapter 3 works out what a click can cost.
You're reading Chapter 4 of Google Ads for Junk Removal, sixteen chapters written for haulers in every state.
