You can build a negative keyword list this afternoon. Every category below is free, and by the end of this page you will have most of what you need to block the obvious waste in a Nashville Google Ads account.
That is not the part we get paid for.
Not the list. The decay.
A negative keyword list is a snapshot of the wrong searches that existed the week it was built. Search behavior does not hold still. New product names enter the vocabulary. A competitor rebrands, and their new name starts pulling budget through a list that never heard of it. A news story makes a phrase ambiguous for a month. Google’s matching shifts, and terms start slipping past a list that was airtight in March.
By June that list is quietly wrong, and nothing in the account announces it. Spend just leaks, in amounts small enough per term that no line looks alarming.
Then there is the failure that hides. Block too much, and the search terms report will not tell you. That report shows searches that triggered your ads. A search your negative blocked never triggered the ad, so it leaves no query-level performance row anywhere in that report. The cost of under-blocking is more visible and usually fixable. The cost of over-blocking produces no direct query-level alert, and the account looks clean while it happens.
So the work is weekly search term review, seasonal reassessment, and deliberately going back to ask whether a negative added six months ago is now blocking something worth having. It never completes, and it is often the first task to fall off an owner’s calendar during a busy quarter, when even a modest leak is least likely to get anyone’s attention.
That is what Rank Nashville sells. Not the categories below. The Tuesday in October when someone opens the report and you are too busy to.
Everything that follows is what we look at, and how we decide.
Where we start reading
Everything here applies to Search campaigns. Negatives behave differently in Display and Video, and Performance Max handles them under its own rules.
The search terms report is the primary account-level evidence available to us, though not a complete one: Google surfaces terms used by a significant number of people, so low-volume queries may never appear as their own rows. We sort by cost and read down.
Then we resist the instinct every guide encourages, which is to block the zero-conversion rows. Spend without conversions is a symptom, not a verdict. Before a term becomes a negative it has to survive four questions:
Is conversion tracking actually firing, or has it been broken since someone edited the thank-you page? Has enough time passed for the relevant conversion lag, given that an emergency HVAC call, a system replacement, and a legal consultation do not mature on the same timeline? Is the volume real, or is this three clicks and a coincidence? Are phone calls counted, since in most local-service categories the call is the primary lead action and one of the easiest conversions to leave unmeasured?
If tracking is clean and the volume is real, one question decides it: can this business serve the intent behind the search? Not whether the click converted. Whether the person wanted something the client sells. A term converting at nothing because the landing page is wrong is a page problem, and blocking it buys a quieter account and the same revenue.
How we choose the exclusion
Three match types apply, and Google’s documentation governs their behavior, which is more often described wrong than right.
Negative broad blocks searches containing all your terms in any order. Negative phrase blocks them in order, extra words around them notwithstanding. Negative exact blocks only those terms in that order with nothing added.
The distinction that costs money: negatives do not match close variants. Google handles casing and misspellings automatically. It does not handle plurals or synonyms. Block “wholesale” and your ad can still show for “wholesalers.” That single gap accounts for a real share of what we find in inherited accounts.
Rank Nashville does not have a default match type, and we distrust agencies that do. Our principle is the broadest exclusion we can justify without capturing plausible buyer intent. Sometimes that is a single broad term, because after reading the client’s offer we can find no plausible buyer intent containing it. Sometimes it is a tight phrase, because the word we need to block sits inside searches we want. That is a question about the client’s business, not about a best practice, and it is the reason a copied list underperforms a decided one.
Two rules follow from the reporting asymmetry above. We never automate the block itself. Rules that flag terms for a person to review are useful, with thresholds set against the account’s own cost per conversion rather than a number an article suggested. A rule that adds negatives on its own produces no error and no line item when it removes real demand. It just goes quiet.
And seasonality changes demand, not what you sell. Blocking “furnace” in July costs an HVAC company the replacement planner, the commercial maintenance contract, and the homeowner scheduling an inspection before fall. We rotate a negative only when a business genuinely stops serving that category for a period. Lower volume is a reason to reassess bids, budget, and economics. It is not a reason to become invisible.
The categories we review first
Not apply. Review. The difference is the whole method.
Job hunters: jobs, careers, hiring, employment, salary, resume, internship. These are close to universal, and close is not the same as universal.
Information seekers: tutorial, how to, DIY, guide, learn, class, course, certification, school, student.
Bargain hunters, when the client is not competing on price: cheap, cheapest, discount, coupon, free, clearance, used, wholesale, liquidation.
Research mode: review, reviews, complaint, scam, lawsuit, vs, versus, compare, alternative. This is the group we argue about, and it demonstrates why a list is not a decision. Someone searching “Nashville plumber reviews” may be two minutes from calling. Blocking review terms keeps out reputation-checkers and it keeps out a buyer doing final diligence. We usually leave them live and watch, then decide from the query context and enough data to read, not from a conversion count and not from a template.
What we check early in a Nashville account
Music economies, visitor volume, and university populations exist in other cities. What differs here is weight. Three ambiguities show up often enough and expensively enough that our team inspects them before anything else. None is a blanket negative. Each is a candidate whose answer depends on the client.
Music. In Nashville, “studio” carries a commercially significant recording-industry meaning alongside fitness, photography, and housing. So do artist, producer, band, session, and Music Row. The failure mode is that these searches look serious, because they are: “music industry accountant” is somebody with money looking for a professional. The real question is not whether the client is in music. It is whether the client can serve what that searcher wants. An electrician can wire a recording studio. A family lawyer can represent a musician. An accountant who does not do royalty and touring income cannot serve “music industry accountant,” and that is when we block it.
Visitors. The Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp reported a record 16.8 million visitors in 2023, with forecasts above 17 million for the years after. They search for things that overlap with what locals need: hotel near, visiting, things to do, broadway, honky tonk, attraction. We handle “downtown” as an address-dependent call rather than a list item. For a business with a downtown address, blocking it costs money. For a Brentwood dental practice, “downtown” may signal a visitor orienting themselves rather than demand the practice can serve, so we read the full query before excluding it. Same term, opposite decision. We skip this category entirely when visitors are legitimate customers.
Universities. A large university population, including Vanderbilt, Belmont, and TSU, can produce searches professional services end up paying for: homework, project help, paper, assignment, dorm, campus. We do not apply “student” as a blanket negative, and the reason is a mistake we see often. “Student” does not mean low budget. A student’s dental work may be covered by family, insurance, or a university plan, and that patient may be worth a decade. The decision runs on the service being sought, the payment model the client accepts, and whether the client can actually serve it.
What you should be able to see every month
A negative keyword review that happened leaves a record: the date, what was added, what was removed, and the reasoning behind each call.
The removals are the part worth looking for. A list that only grows deserves scrutiny, because additions are visible and over-blocking has to be investigated deliberately. That is the difference between a list being maintained and a list being accumulated.
Put that question to whoever runs your ads right now, including us if you hire us. When was the negative list last reviewed, what went in, what came out, on what reasoning. A date and specific terms is one answer. A shrug is the other.
What we promise about the numbers, which is less than you have been told
A negative changes one thing directly: eligibility. Your ad stops entering certain auctions. Everything downstream, CTR, conversion rate, cost per conversion, Quality Score, impression share, may move afterward, and how it moves depends on structure, bidding, budget, tracking, and which searches came out.
We will not promise a predetermined movement in any of them. A forecast can be worth having when it is stated as conditional on which searches came out, the bidding model, the budget, and whether conversion tracking is trustworthy. Stated as an outcome, it is a sales number. Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic, not a dial negatives turn. Impression share is a ratio of impressions received to impressions you were eligible for, so removing eligibility can push it down, up, or nowhere; a drop proves nothing about whether the work was right.
So here is the split, and it is the same asymmetry this page opened with. Rank Nashville measures whether spend moves away from intent the business cannot serve, because that leaves a trail. Separately, we audit the exclusions against what the business actually sells, because suppressed demand leaves no query-level row to measure. Waste gets measured. Over-blocking gets investigated. The two do not share evidence, and collapsing them into a single number reports only the half that leaves a trail.
When negatives are not your problem
Sometimes the terms are qualified, the negatives are clean, and the money still is not converting. At that point the leak is downstream of the click, and pruning the list further will not find it. It is usually the landing page, the offer, or a conversion path that breaks before the form submits.
Saying so costs us the easier conversation. A list is always prunable, and an agency can bill for pruning it every month while the actual constraint sits untouched. Rank Nashville would rather name it and lose the busywork than keep working a list that is already doing its job.
Where to start
Open your search term report, sort by cost, and read the zero-conversion rows without blocking any of them. Ten minutes will show you where the first investigation belongs. It will not tell you whether those searches should be excluded, because that is the question the four checks above exist to answer. But it is the same place our team starts.
If those rows hold meaningful spend, we can work out how much of it is genuinely irrelevant intent and what should happen to the rest. Negative keyword layering is part of every campaign in our Google Ads management, handled as ongoing work rather than a launch checklist item.
If you want us to look before you commit to anything, request an audit. We will tell you what your search terms show, including the possibility that your negatives are already doing their job and the constraint sits somewhere else entirely.
Call Nick Rizkalla at (615) 988-1309 for a free account audit. We will show you which searches are consuming budget, which of them should be excluded, and which ones point to a different problem.
Rank Nashville, 615 Main Street, Suite 123, Nashville, TN 37206, (615) 988-1309