Which search terms should you actually be bidding on?
Keyword research tools give you volume. Volume is the least important attribute of a keyword. What matters is what the person typing it intends to do in the next ten minutes.
Here is how to sort candidate terms into buy, test and avoid — before you spend anything on them.
The four intent tiers
Every commercial query falls into one of four tiers, and your budget should flow to them in this order:
- Emergency / immediate need — "emergency electrician near me", "same day boiler repair". Highest CPC, highest conversion rate, almost always worth it.
- Purchase intent — "buy [product] online", "[service] quote", "[service] cost". Strong converters; price-shoppers, so your offer needs to be clear.
- Comparison — "best [product] uk", "[competitor] alternative". Worth testing with tight copy and a comparison landing page.
- Research — "how to fix", "what is", "salary", "jobs", "DIY", "free template". Almost never worth paid clicks for a small budget. Serve these with blog content instead.
Modifiers that predict conversions
Certain words attached to a query reliably raise or lower conversion rate regardless of industry. Bid up on the first group and add the second group as negatives from day one.
- Positive: near me, emergency, same day, quote, cost, price, book, hire, buy, [town name], 24 hour, open now
- Negative: free, DIY, how to, salary, jobs, career, apprenticeship, course, training, wiki, meaning, second hand, used (unless you sell used)
Match type strategy when the budget is small
On budgets under about £1,500/month, start with phrase and exact match only. Broad match needs conversion volume and a well-fed Smart Bidding model to behave; without that, it will spend your month's budget discovering that people also search for jobs in your industry.
Once you have 30+ conversions a month and a solid negative list, introduce one broad-match campaign as a discovery channel with a small share of spend. Mine it for new exact-match terms and keep pushing the junk into negatives.
Mine your own search terms report before any keyword tool
Your search terms report is real demand data from your real customers in your real service area. It beats any third-party estimate.
The routine: sort by cost descending, look at every term with spend and zero conversions, decide keep/block, then look at terms with conversions that are not yet keywords and promote them to exact match with their own ad group.
That loop is exactly what Zevrion runs every morning — it scores each term high, medium or low waste risk against your conversion data and proposes the negative keyword at the shortest phrase that blocks the pattern without blocking good traffic.
Don't forget brand and competitor terms
Bidding on your own brand is cheap insurance if competitors are showing on your name — check Auction Insights before deciding, as it is wasted money if nobody else is there.
Bidding on competitor brand names works only when you have a genuine, specific differentiator to put in the ad. Otherwise you pay premium CPCs for people who already decided.
See this running on your own account
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