Negative Keywords for Local Businesses
Budgets are Tight
Don’t Bid on Your Competitor’s Brand Name
- They forgot their appointment time or are looking to reschedule
- They need directions for their appointment
- They have questions about insurance claims
Undesirable Google Ads Impacts
5 Tools To Find Negative Keywords
So we know not to deliberately bid on our competitors’ business names. Let’s go a step further by making sure anything related to our competition is added as a negative keyword. So how do we find competitor business information?
1) Search Terms Reports - Especially Microsoft
A common way would be to comb through the search terms provided by Google to find negatives. This is something you should be doing periodically anyway. I would strongly recommend that you go through the search term report daily at the beginning of an ad campaign and weekly after that.


2) Use Our Negative Keyword Lists
On this site (FlexLeads.com), we have negative keyword lists containing the most common first and last names in the United States. By merely implementing these negative keywords, you’ll cut down on a lot of searches for your competitors and save your ad dollars for more relevant searches.
3) Google Ads Keyword Planner


4) Use Other Keyword Tools
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool by Neil Patel which allows you to search for keywords related to your subject matter for free.

5) Use a Free Library Resource - referenceUSA
If you can take advantage of your local library and the Reference USA subscription which it may have to find out pertinent information about your competitors. This one of the best tools it is free.



I then click on “View Results” to see all the general dentists in the Greensboro, NC area.




Advanced: Refining Your Excel Spreadsheet to Add Negatives

Then you’ll highlight all data in that remaining column and Select – Data – Sort A-Z. I also deleted all blank rows.


There are other more automated ways to perform this process, but it gets into pretty advanced excel user-defined functions.
Add Negative Keywords to Your Ad Campaigns



Match Type for Negatives Behaves Differently

Negative Keywords
Get our List of over 3600 Negative Keywords for free by clicking below: