How to Improve Search Term Relevancy in Google Ads (Step-by-Step)

TL;DR: Search term relevancy is the gap between what people type into Google and what your ads are actually targeting. When that gap is wide, you burn budget on irrelevant clicks. This guide walks you through a practical, repeatable process to tighten that gap—step by step. Whether you're a freelancer managing a handful of accounts or an agency handling dozens, the same core workflow applies: audit what's triggering your ads, cut the junk, reinforce what's working, and build smarter keyword structures going forward. No spreadsheet wizardry required.

By the end of this guide, you'll know exactly how to review your search terms report, identify low-relevancy patterns, add the right negative keywords, apply match types strategically, and set up a routine that keeps your campaigns clean over time.

Step 1: Pull and Read Your Search Terms Report Properly

Before you can improve search term relevancy, you need to understand what's actually triggering your ads. This is where a lot of advertisers slip up: they look at their keyword list and assume that's what people are searching. It's not.

Your keyword list is what you're bidding on. Your Search Terms Report is what people actually typed. With broad and phrase match in the mix, those two things can look very different from each other.

To access it in Google Ads, go to Campaigns > Search terms tab in the left navigation. Set your date range to at least 30 days, and ideally 60 to 90 days if the account has enough volume. A 7-day window is one of the most common mistakes I see during audits. It's too short to surface meaningful patterns, especially in accounts with moderate traffic. You end up making decisions based on noise.

Once you're in the report, focus on these columns: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Conversions, and Conv. Rate. CTR is a vanity metric here. A search term can have a 15% CTR and zero conversions, which means you're paying for highly engaged but completely wrong traffic.

Here's the first thing to do: sort by Cost descending. Your biggest wasted spend is almost always sitting at the top of that list. Look for the pattern: high cost, zero conversions, and a search term that clearly has nothing to do with what you're selling. That's your first red flag, and it's usually more obvious than people expect.

In most accounts I audit, the top 10 to 20 most expensive search terms include at least a few that have no business being there. Job-seeker queries, competitor brand names, informational "how to" searches, or completely unrelated industries that happen to share a word with your keywords. The report doesn't lie.

Don't move to the next step until you've set the right date range and sorted by cost. Everything else builds from this foundation.

Step 2: Score Each Search Term for Relevancy

Once you've pulled the report, you need a consistent way to evaluate what you're looking at. Without a framework, it's easy to either get too aggressive (blocking terms that might convert) or too passive (leaving obvious junk running).

A simple 3-tier scoring system works well in practice:

High Relevancy: The search term directly matches the user intent you're targeting. The person searching this is likely your customer. For a B2B SaaS product, something like "project management software for teams" would be High. It's specific, commercial, and clearly aligned with what you're offering.

Medium Relevancy: The term is related to your space but the intent doesn't quite line up. "Free project management tools" might fall here if you're a paid product. The searcher is in your category, but they're not looking for what you sell right now. These require judgment calls based on your offer and funnel.

Low Relevancy: The term is clearly off-target. "Project management jobs" is a classic example. Someone looking for employment is not going to buy your software. Neither is someone searching for "project management certification" or "what is project management." These are Low, and they should be cut.

The most common intent mismatches to watch for:

Informational queries triggering commercial ads: Searches starting with "what is," "how does," "why do," or "can I" usually signal someone in research mode, not buying mode.

Job-seeker queries: Any search containing "jobs," "careers," "salary," "hiring," or "resume" is almost never going to convert for a product or service campaign.

Free/DIY seekers: Terms like "free," "DIY," "open source," or "template" indicate someone who isn't looking to pay. If you're selling a paid product, these are Low by default.

Competitor brand terms: Unless you're intentionally running a competitor targeting campaign, these terms often have poor conversion rates and inflated CPCs.

This is also where you start to see what PPC practitioners call "match type leakage." Broad match keywords are designed to pull in semantically related queries, but Google's interpretation of "related" has gotten increasingly liberal. A broad match keyword for "PPC software" might trigger searches for "paid advertising courses" or "Google Ads freelancer." Semantically adjacent, but not your customer.

By the end of this step, you should have a working list of Low-relevancy terms to cut and Medium-relevancy terms to evaluate. That list is your action plan for the next two steps.

Step 3: Build Your Negative Keyword List from Low-Relevancy Terms

Now you're taking action. Your Low-relevancy list from Step 2 becomes the foundation of your negative keyword strategy. But how you add those negatives matters as much as which ones you add.

There are two types of negatives to think about here:

Exact match negatives for specific irrelevant terms you've identified. If "project management jobs" is showing up and spending budget, add [project management jobs] as an exact match negative. It blocks that specific query without affecting anything else.

Phrase match negatives for patterns. If you're seeing multiple job-seeker queries, you don't need to add each one individually. Add "jobs," "careers," and "hiring" as phrase match negatives and you'll block the entire category of queries containing those words.

In Google Ads, you can add negatives at three levels: ad group level, campaign level, or via a shared negative keyword list. Here's when to use each:

Ad group level makes sense when a term is only irrelevant for one specific ad group but might be fine for others. This is the most granular option but also the most time-consuming to manage.

Campaign level is the right call when a term is irrelevant across your entire campaign. Most of your negatives will live here.

Shared negative lists are where agencies should be spending their energy. If you manage multiple accounts in the same vertical, or multiple campaigns with overlapping audiences, a shared list lets you apply the same negative keywords across all of them at once. Update the list once, and it applies everywhere it's attached. This is one of the highest-leverage moves in PPC management that most people underuse.

One mistake I see constantly: adding negatives too aggressively without cross-referencing against converting search terms. Before you add a negative, run a quick check. Does this term appear anywhere in your converting search terms? If "free trial" is on your cut list but you've had conversions from "free trial project management software," you need to think carefully before blocking it.

A practical tip that makes future audits much faster: group your negatives thematically. Create separate lists named something like "Job Seeker Terms," "Competitor Brand Terms," and "Free/DIY Terms." When you're auditing three months from now, you'll know exactly where to look and why each term was excluded. This is especially useful when you're handing off an account or onboarding a new team member.

Step 4: Apply Match Types to Reinforce High-Relevancy Terms

Negative keywords stop the bleeding. Match types determine where your budget flows next. This is your primary lever for controlling which search terms trigger your ads going forward.

Here's the practical decision framework:

Exact match gives you maximum relevancy control. Your ad only shows for searches that closely match the meaning of your keyword. Use this for your highest-converting, highest-confidence terms. When a search term from your report has converted multiple times and it's clearly the right intent, add it as an exact match keyword in the relevant ad group.

Phrase match offers moderate control with some flexibility. Your ad shows for searches that include the meaning of your keyword, with room for additional context. This is a good middle ground when you want to capture variations of a converting term without locking in too tightly.

Broad match gives Google the most latitude to decide what's relevant. It can work well when paired with Smart Bidding and a solid base of conversion data, but in newer accounts or lower-volume campaigns, it's often the source of the match type leakage we talked about in Step 2.

The tactical workflow here is straightforward: for every High-relevancy search term that has converted, add it as an exact match keyword in the relevant ad group. This is sometimes called "harvesting" converting search terms, and it's one of the highest-ROI activities in ongoing PPC management.

What usually happens when you do this consistently is that your exact match keywords start capturing more of your converting traffic, your broad match keywords get fewer irrelevant triggers, and your overall account relevancy improves over time.

This is also where keyword sculpting comes in. The goal is to structure your ad groups so that the right keywords are positioned to capture the right search terms. If you have overlapping keywords across ad groups, Google may serve the wrong ad to the wrong query, which hurts relevancy and Quality Score simultaneously.

The mistake most agencies make here is running everything on broad match and assuming Smart Bidding will sort it out. Smart Bidding optimizes for conversion probability, but it doesn't filter for intent alignment the way a well-structured match type strategy does. Especially in accounts with limited conversion history, broad match without guardrails is expensive.

Step 5: Restructure Ad Groups Around Intent Clusters

Here's where longer-term relevancy improvements happen. Match types and negatives are tactical. Ad group structure is strategic. And when your ad group structure is wrong, no amount of negative keywords will fully fix your relevancy problem.

The core issue: when one ad group tries to cover too many different intents, match type control breaks down. Google has to pick one ad to show for a wide range of queries, and it can't do that well when the keywords in that ad group represent five different user intentions.

The solution is intent clustering: grouping keywords by the specific user intent they serve rather than just by topic.

Here's a practical example. Say you have a bloated "PPC tools" ad group containing keywords for automation, reporting, optimization, and competitor analysis. That's four distinct intents in one group. Split it into:

"PPC automation tools" for users who want to automate campaign management tasks.

"Google Ads optimization software" for users actively looking to improve campaign performance.

"PPC reporting tools" for users focused on client reporting and dashboards.

Each group now has tightly themed keywords, ads written specifically for that intent, and a landing page that speaks directly to what that searcher wants. That alignment is exactly what improves Quality Score: specifically, the Ad Relevance and Expected CTR components.

Higher Quality Score means better Ad Rank at the same or lower bid, which typically means lower CPCs over time. The structure pays for itself.

Here's the signal to watch for: if your Search Terms Report shows a cluster of relevant, converting search terms that don't match any existing ad group, that's your cue to create one. The search terms report isn't just a cleanup tool. It's a map for where your account structure should evolve next.

For agencies managing large accounts, keyword clustering tools can significantly speed up this process by automatically grouping related search terms by theme or intent. What would take hours in a spreadsheet can be done in minutes with the right workflow.

Step 6: Set Up a Weekly Search Term Audit Routine

Everything we've covered so far is a one-time cleanup. This step is what keeps it clean. And this is where most advertisers fall short: they do a solid audit once, feel good about it, and then let the account drift for months until the same problems reappear.

Google's matching behavior evolves continuously. New search terms appear every week. Seasonal shifts change what people search for. Your campaigns need regular maintenance, not just occasional overhauls.

A lightweight weekly routine takes 15 to 20 minutes per account and covers the essentials:

New high-spend, zero-conversion terms:Filter the Search Terms Report for the past 7 days, sort by cost descending, and look for terms spending above your target CPA with no conversions. Add them as negatives immediately.

New converting terms: Any search term that converted in the past 7 days and isn't already an exact match keyword is a candidate for harvesting. Add it to the relevant ad group with exact match.

New patterns: If you see multiple variations of the same irrelevant theme appearing, add a phrase match negative to your shared list to block the entire pattern going forward.

To make this faster, use the Search Terms Report filters in Google Ads. Filter by "Added/Excluded" = "None" to surface search terms that haven't been acted on yet. Filter by cost above a threshold to prioritize where your attention goes. These two filters together cut your review time significantly.

This is where a tool like Keywordme compresses the workflow considerably. Instead of exporting to a spreadsheet, reviewing, making decisions, then going back into Google Ads to implement, you can do everything directly in the Search Terms Report interface. One-click negative additions, one-click keyword adds, match type applications without leaving the tab you're already on. For agencies running weekly audits across multiple accounts, that kind of friction reduction adds up fast.

One final tip: document your decisions. Add notes to your shared negative lists explaining why certain terms were excluded. "Blocked: job seeker terms, added July 2026" is the kind of context that saves future you (or a new team member) from undoing work that was done for good reason.

Your Search Term Relevancy Checklist

Here's a scannable summary of everything covered in this guide. Run through this checklist on every new account audit and use it as your weekly maintenance reference.

Pull the Search Terms Report with a 60-90 day window. Sort by cost descending. Don't rely on 7-day data for initial audits.

Score each term by relevancy tier. High, Medium, or Low based on intent alignment. Flag Low terms for immediate action and Medium terms for judgment calls.

Add negatives by pattern and match type. Phrase match negatives for categories (jobs, free, DIY), exact match negatives for specific irrelevant terms. Use shared lists for agency accounts.

Promote converting terms to exact or phrase match. Harvest your best search terms as exact match keywords in the relevant ad groups. Don't leave converting traffic to broad match chance.

Restructure ad groups by intent cluster. Split bloated ad groups into tightly themed groups. Let your search terms report show you where the gaps are.

Schedule a weekly 15-minute audit. New terms appear constantly. Build the habit before the account drifts again.

If you want to run this entire workflow without leaving Google Ads, Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme and see how much faster the process gets when everything is one click away instead of a spreadsheet export.