Ask any irrigation crew for its money search and you'll hear the same four words: "sprinkler repair near me." Roughly 33,100 Americans type it every month. It's the right place to start. It's also a small slice of the people who will hire someone to fix a sprinkler this year.
Everyone else describes the problem in their own words, and those words rarely make anyone's launch list. A homeowner with a soggy patch by the patio types "sprinkler pipe leak repair." Another, after a landscaper's trencher went through a line, types "repair sprinkler line break." In October, tens of thousands type "sprinkler blowout," a search that barely appeared anywhere in our own keyword research. This chapter explains how we reach both groups: an exact-match campaign for the searches you already know convert, and a broad-match campaign, added later, that finds the ones you don't.
"Sprinkler Repair Near Me" Is the Search Every Irrigation Crew Already Knows. It's Also the Smallest Part of the Pile.
The first campaign we build is called Isolation. The label is ours; Google's menus won't show it: an exact-match campaign with manual bids that buys only the searches you've picked because you're confident they turn into jobs. For a company that services sprinklers, that list starts with the obvious ones. "Sprinkler repair near me" draws about 33,100 US searches a month, "sprinkler system repair" about 22,200, and "irrigation repair near me" about 14,800.
Exact match is the right tool for that job. In Google's words, exact match is the option that gives you "the most steering" over who sees the ad, at the price of reaching "fewer searches" than phrase or broad. Steering is what a new account needs. These are the searches where you can predict the job, the price and the person on the other end of the phone, so they're where the first conversions come from.
But a list built from the searches you can name will always be small, because people describe sprinkler trouble in hundreds of ways you'd never write down.
Sprinklers make the clearest example, but every service works the same way. In the same US pull, patio and paver searches with a clear hire word came to 148 different wordings, and 70 of them draw under 100 searches a month. Mowing searches ran to 161 wordings, from "lawn mowing service" to "one off lawn mowing" and "grass cutting and snow removal services." The big searches in each service go in Isolation. The tail waits for Exploration.
Keyword Planner Lists 801 Ways to Hire Help With a Sprinkler. 595 of Them Draw Under 100 Searches a Month.
When we filtered our US keyword pull for sprinkler and irrigation searches with a clear hire word, such as repair, install, service, company or near me, and removed the DIY, parts and brand searches, 801 different wordings were left. Of those, 595 draw fewer than 100 searches a month each. Keyword Planner groups close variants under one shared volume, so we count wordings rather than adding the volumes up. Picture a sprinkler line: three fat pipes at the top, hundreds of drip emitters below.
The small ones aren't junk. Many are some of the most expensive searches in the set, because they come from people with a specific, urgent problem. "Sprinkler pipe leak repair" draws about 90 a month, with top-of-page estimates up to $32.02. "Repair sprinkler line break" draws about 20, with estimates up to $40. "Irrigation leak detection and repair" draws about 10, with estimates up to $30.01. Nobody puts "repair sprinkler line break" on a launch list. Plenty of people type it with a puddle in the yard.
The people behind those searches often aren't regular customers yet. In the reviews we read, new homeowners came up again and again, including irrigation customers who inherited the previous owner's sprinkler company along with the house. Someone who just moved in doesn't know which landscaper to call. They describe the problem, and the company whose ad answers that description gets the call.
The Biggest Seasonal Sprinkler Search Barely Showed Up in Our Research. Broad Match Would Have Found It.
Here's the clearest example of what a hand-built list misses. "Sprinkler blowout," the fall job of clearing water out of a system before it freezes, draws about 33,100 US searches in October and about 320 in February. "Sprinkler winterization" hits about 14,800 in October. In spring the opposite job, "sprinkler system startup," peaks at about 590 searches in May. Homeowners phrase it other ways too: "sprinkler turn on service" reaches about 210 in May and almost nothing in winter. Each of those is small, and each one is a booked visit for a crew that's already driving past the house.
Our own 19,004-idea keyword pull for this guide, seeded with 20 landscaping terms including "sprinkler repair," returned "sprinkler blowout" exactly once, inside another company's name, and no sprinkler winterization search at all. The twelve competitor websites we used in Chapter 5 produced only 23 irrigation ideas between them. Seeded research reflects whatever the seeds happen to say. If no one in your seed list talks about fall blowouts, Keyword Planner won't hand them to you, and an exact-match campaign built from that research will never see October coming.
You can add seasonal searches by hand once you know them, and Chapter 14 builds a calendar around them. But there will always be searches like these that no one thought of. That's the job of the second campaign.
Broad Match Only Gets the Keywords That Already Book Jobs. A Cost Target Keeps It From Wandering.
Campaign number two is Exploration, another BrandRocket label. We start from a copy of Isolation, keep only the handful of keywords with booked jobs behind them, usually three to five, and flip them to broad. On broad, Google can put your ad in front of related searches, even ones that share none of your words. It's how "sprinkler repair near me" can reach "repair sprinkler line break" without you ever typing it.
Broad match needs a guardrail, and Google is blunt that it belongs with Smart Bidding, which sets each bid from the signals in that one search. So Exploration bids with Maximize Conversions plus a target CPA, set from what a conversion actually costs in Isolation. The target keeps broad match from paying whatever it likes for loosely related searches. Google's own guidance lines up with this. Google's recommendation tool agrees: for a campaign with a track record, it proposes a target near the last 30 days' average cost per conversion and wants about 30 conversions before you judge the result. Aim too low, Google cautions, and you'll miss conversions you could have had. Start near what Isolation is really paying, not near what you wish it cost.
Give Exploration its own budget, too. If it shares a budget with Isolation, the broad campaign's appetite can starve the exact one, and the searches you trust most lose their spend to the ones you're still testing.
Timing matters. Exploration usually launches around months two or three, but the month isn't the rule. The gate is conversion volume: we look for about 30 quality conversions a month before opening it, so a busier, higher-spending account gets there sooner. Launch it before the account has that data and the bidding has nothing reliable to learn from.
Broad Match Will Also Find "Backflow Testing." Whether You Want It Depends on Your License.
Broad match finds new customers and new problems in the same sweep. Some of what it brings back will be good business you didn't expect. Some will be work you can't do.
"Backflow testing" is a good example. It draws about 9,900 US searches a month, and its top-of-page estimates run up to $45.14, the highest of any sprinkler search we pulled. Broad match will happily connect it to your irrigation keywords. But backflow testing is a licensed specialty in some states. Texas, for one, licenses backflow prevention assembly testers separately. If you hold that license, it may be worth a campaign of its own. If you don't, it's a negative keyword, and so is "fire sprinkler pipe repair," which belongs to a different trade entirely. Other finds go the other way. "Commercial irrigation repair" is tiny, about 50 searches a month, yet its top-of-page estimates reach $29.07, and a company that keeps office parks and HOA grounds green should want every one of them. Chapter 16 is about that customer.
The irrigation reviews we read give one more reason to watch what broad match sells. Three of the 24 low-star irrigation reviews describe a company recommending a whole new system, then another company or the homeowner fixing it for little. Ads that promise repair, and pages that explain what a repair usually involves, speak to the homeowner looking for a fix rather than a replacement pitch.
That's why the first 30 days of Exploration need someone reading the search terms report every day, adding negatives as they appear. Chapter 5 covers how to build them, plurals and misspellings included. In our experience the list grows fastest in the first two weeks, then settle as the obvious junk gets blocked.
Isolation and Exploration Trade Places Over Time. Neither One Gets Switched Off for Good.
Once Exploration is running well, the two campaigns start to overlap. In our experience, Exploration often ends up carrying most of the conversions, because it reaches the long tail Isolation can't. Isolation can be paused when Exploration covers its keywords well, and turned back on later when you want to win a specific position for a specific search, such as "sprinkler repair near me" in May.
A simple test tells you when. Pull the search terms report for both campaigns. When most of the searches Isolation buys are also showing up in Exploration, at a cost per conversion you're comfortable with, Isolation can rest. When a search that matters starts slipping in position or price, bring Isolation back for that search.
Think of them as two zones on the same controller. One waters the beds you planted on purpose. The other reaches the corners you didn't know were dry. Our Google Ads management runs both and moves budget between them as the season and the data change.
Next: Retaining Wall Clicks Run Up to $29.66. Mowing Clicks Top Out Near $11. Set Manual Bids Ad Group by Ad Group.
Exact match needs bids, and the right bid depends on the job. Chapter 7 sets manual bids by ad group, reads impression share and auction insights, and shows how Isolation's real costs become Exploration's target.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
