What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are search terms a business tells its ad platform to exclude, so ads stop showing for searches like "free" or "jobs" that will never turn into a paying customer.

In Plain Terms

Negative keywords tell an ad platform which searches to exclude an ad from, even when the search technically contains a keyword the campaign is targeting. A shop bidding on "CNC machining" might discover its ad keeps showing up for "CNC machining jobs" or "CNC machining course" — searches from job seekers and students, not buyers — and add "jobs" and "course" as negative keywords to stop wasting spend on those clicks.

Without a negative keyword list, broad or phrase match keywords can trigger ads for a wide range of loosely related searches, many of which will never produce a real customer. Every one of those clicks still costs money.

Building and maintaining a solid negative keyword list is one of the more tedious but consistently effective parts of running PPC well — it doesn't win new customers directly, but it stops paying for clicks that never could have.

Example

A metal fabrication shop's Google Ads account was spending a meaningful chunk of its monthly budget on clicks from searches like "metal fabrication training" and "metal fabrication salary" — people researching a career, not sourcing a supplier. Adding those terms as negative keywords immediately redirected that spend toward actual buyer searches, lowering cost per lead without increasing the budget.

Why It Matters for Manufacturers

Industrial search terms often overlap with unrelated searches — job seekers, students, hobbyists, and researchers all search similar language to actual buyers. A well-maintained negative keyword list is one of the most direct ways to lower wasted ad spend without touching bids or budgets at all.

How MFG Web Design Handles Negative Keywords

Every PPC account we manage under Industrial PPC Management starts with an industry-specific negative keyword list and gets it reviewed on an ongoing basis, not set once and forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a business find its negative keywords?

By regularly reviewing the search terms report inside the ad platform, which shows the actual searches that triggered an ad to appear. Any term that's clearly not a real buyer — "jobs," "free," "DIY," a competitor's brand name in the wrong context — becomes a candidate for the negative list.

Is building a negative keyword list a one-time task?

No, it's ongoing. New irrelevant search terms show up as a campaign runs and search behavior shifts, so the list needs regular review, not a single setup pass at the start of the campaign.