We gave Google's Keyword Planner the websites of twelve pest control companies that advertise in our example market, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and asked it for keyword ideas. It handed back 11,359 of them.
Most of those will never earn you a dollar. About one in six is another pest company's name. Hundreds are people shopping for spray. Nearly 2,000 more are ID questions and bug trivia. When we kept only the searches from people hiring a company, with real volume and bids high enough to show advertisers compete for them, about 170 groups of close variations were left. That's a first campaign.
This chapter is the process that gets you from the first number to the second, in your own market. Your numbers will differ. The shape won't.
Watch Who Bids in Your Market Without Clicking a Single Rival's Ad
First, learn who is already buying clicks in your market. The obvious move, typing "pest control near me" into Google on your phone and clicking around, is the wrong one. Every search you run adds impressions to whichever ads show up, and every click you make on a competitor's ad costs them money and tells Google nothing true about a buyer.
Google has a tool for this: the Ad preview and diagnosis tool, under Tools, then Troubleshooting, in your Google Ads account. You type a search and set the conditions, including the language and the location, and it shows you the page a person there would see. Google's own help page says the preview doesn't pile up impressions on anyone's ads, including yours.
Set the location to your service area, run the searches that matter ("pest control near me," "exterminator," "termite inspection," the pest names your market uses) and write down every company that shows an ad. Local independents, regional operators, national brands. That list is your seed list for the next step.
Run the same searches more than once, on different days and at different hours, and from a couple of spots around your service area. Chapter 4 showed that the searcher's location and the time of day feed into every auction, so a single check can miss a company that only appears for some neighborhoods or some hours.
Leave the rivals' ads unclicked. The tool gives you their names; their websites you can visit directly, for free.
A Rival's Website Is the Best Seed You'll Ever Put Into Keyword Planner
Among Keyword Planner's starting points is one that takes a website address instead of words, then mines that site's pages for search ideas. That's the most useful research move in pest control, because your competitors have already written pages for every bug they treat, and Google reads those pages the way it reads yours.
For each competitor on your list:
- Open Keyword Planner and choose to discover new keywords starting with a website.
- Enter the competitor's home page and let it read the whole site.
- Set the location to your market, not the whole country, so the volumes and bids are local.
- Download the results, keeping the monthly search volume and the bid estimate that come with each idea. Both matter in the sorting that follows.
Then run your own website the same way. It's the fastest way to see your site through Google's eyes. If your termite page never produces termite keywords, Google doesn't think it's about termites, and neither will your Quality Score (Chapter 4).
In the example market, twelve sites produced 11,359 unique ideas once duplicates were removed. That's the raw material. The rest of the chapter is sorting.
Nearly One Idea in Six Is Another Pest Company's Name
Seed Keyword Planner with competitors' websites and it hands back their brand searches. In the example market, 1,902 of the 11,359 ideas contained another company's name: the national brands, the Florida regionals and the local shops.
Those go on your negative list. The fastest way to find them is the list of advertisers you wrote down in the first step: search the downloads for each name, plus the local shops you already know, and the brand searches fall out in minutes. Someone who types a company's name wants that company. Paying for their click is paying to be the second choice of a person who already made up their mind.
Two related rules from our method:
- Your own name gets its own campaign. Chapter 2 covered why. It's cheap, it protects your top spot, and it keeps brand clicks from inflating your other campaigns' numbers.
- Bidding on competitors is a separate decision, if it ever happens. If you ever go there, it's a campaign of its own, with a budget you set aside on purpose. It is never something that slips into your main campaigns because Keyword Planner suggested it. For most pest companies, it's a big if.
Competitor names come back again, in far larger numbers, once Exploration (our BrandRocket name for the broad-match campaign that follows your first one) goes live. That's where the negative list earns its keep, and it's why the list is never finished.
Blocking "Killer" Would Cut Off "Pest Killer Near Me." Negatives Need a Scalpel.
The next layer is the do-it-yourselfers and the curious: people pricing spray, looking for a product, searching for a job or trying to identify a bug. In our example-market files, the patterns were easy to spot: "how to" and "get rid of" searches, "spray," "killer," "bait," "repellent," product names like "termidor sc," store names like "home depot," "careers" and "jobs," and "what does it look like."
It's tempting to block the whole word "killer." Don't. Keyword Planner groups "pest killer near me" with "pest control near me," the same volume and the same bids, because the people typing it want a company. Block the product phrases instead: "roach killer," "ant killer," "wasp killer."
That precision matters for another reason. Google's negative keywords "won't match to close variants." A negative for "roach killer" does nothing about "roach killers," and misspellings slip through too. Add the singular and the plural, and the common misspellings you see in your search terms.
Two words need a business decision, not a reflex: "cheap" and "free." In the example market, Keyword Planner estimates "free termite inspection" at $17.34 to $60.96 a click and "cheap pest control" at $6.71 to $32.45. Advertisers compete for those searches because some of them turn into customers. If you offer a free inspection, "free" is your word. If you don't compete on price, "cheap" probably isn't. Decide on purpose.
A few more to consider, depending on your business:
- Public agencies. Some counties run mosquito or vector control programs that treat for free. "Vector control" searches may be looking for the county, not you.
- Renters and landlords. "My landlord" and "tenant" searches often come from someone who isn't the one paying.
- Services you don't offer. If you don't do wildlife, "raccoon removal" is a negative, not a stretch goal. If you do, it earns an ad group and a page of its own.
Once Exploration goes live, the search terms report becomes a daily read for the first month. Broad match will find searches no keyword tool showed you, some of them excellent and some of them absurd, and every absurd one you catch early is budget you keep. After that first month, a weekly read usually holds.
Put these on shared negative keyword lists rather than typing them into each campaign. Google allows up to 5,000 keywords on a list and 20 lists per account, which is plenty for a pest company's lifetime.
About 170 Searches Become Tight Ad Groups Before a Single Ad Goes Live
The searches that survive the sorting get organized before anything goes live, and the example market shows what that looks like. Of the roughly 170 groups of hire searches, 122 were general: "pest control" or "exterminator," often with "near me" or a town name. Termite searches made up 29, rodents 10, bed bugs 5, ants and roaches 3 each and mosquitoes 1. Your market's mix will differ, but the pattern is common: a big general pile and a handful of pest-specific ones. Keyword Planner's volumes are monthly averages, too, so a termite group that looks small on paper can carry a lot of your spring calls; Chapter 3's season chart showed how far termite searches swing between winter and May.
Both kinds need structure:
- General searches split by how people phrase them: "near me" searches in one ad group, "exterminator" searches in another, town and neighborhood names in a third. The ad for "pest control near me" and the ad for "exterminator in Brandon" can say different things.
- Pest-specific searches get their own ad groups, the way Chapter 4 laid them out, each pointed at its own page: termites, rodents, bed bugs and the rest you actually treat.
Keep every ad group tight: around five or six close variations of the same search. "Termite inspection," "termite inspection near me" and "termite inspection cost" belong together. "Termite damage repair" is a different job, and it may not be one you do.
At launch, these run as exact match only. That's Isolation, our name for the starter campaign that buys only the searches you've chosen word for word, so every dollar goes to a search you picked on purpose. The looser match types stay off until Exploration, which begins once the ads are selling plans.
Write Keyword Planner's price estimate beside every search you keep, and read it as an opening bid to test, never a quote. Google says the estimate reflects Quality Score and competition, and in our experience actual costs can land 30% above or below it. Chapter 7 turns those ranges into real bids.
Next: Exact Match First, Then the Words Your Customers Use
With about 170 hire searches in tight ad groups and a negative list in place, the account is ready for its first campaign. Chapter 6 covers why it starts on exact match, and how the broad-match campaign later finds the local names for bugs that no keyword tool will hand you.
If you're new here, Chapter 1 sets up tracking and Chapter 4 explains why each pest needs its own ad group. The full run of sixteen sits on the guide's home page.
For the pest companies on our Google Ads management, this research runs before a single ad does, and the negative list keeps growing every week the account is live.
