Contractor keywords punish sloppy accounts. So I rebuilt this one.

Contractor keywords are among the most competitive and expensive in local paid search. One bad month of broad targeting can burn a small contractor's entire budget on price shoppers and people comparing bag prices at the hardware store.

The account I took over was paying for exactly that. Belcrete needed campaigns disciplined enough to produce estimate requests for profitable jobs: driveways, patios, foundations, commercial work.

Rebuild around restraint. Service specific campaigns, each with its own ads and budget, and a negative keyword list written before the first dollar went out.

Most accounts add negatives reactively, after the money is gone. I mined search terms weekly from day one, so the exclusion list grew faster than the waste could.

I structured campaigns around service specific keyword themes: driveways, patios, foundations, commercial work, each with dedicated ads and its own budget line.

Calls and form submissions were tracked as conversions, so budget flowed toward the campaigns producing real estimate requests instead of the ones producing cheap clicks.

Restructuring cut cost per click by more than 50% and took the conversion rate from 0% to a consistent 20-30%.

The negative keyword discipline keeps the budget concentrated on estimate ready searches month after month, without me having to rescue the account.