High-Intent Search Queries: How to Rebuild Your Google Ads Around Them

Most Google Ads accounts we take over from other agencies or from a business owner managing their own campaigns are burning a shocking share of budget on searches that never had any real chance of converting. We have audited enough accounts at Canada Create over the years to say this with confidence: the single most impactful fix in most underperforming ad accounts is not a bigger budget, it is a harder focus on high-intent search queries.

This is not theoretical advice. Below is the exact process Canada Create uses when we rebuild a client’s Google Ads account around intent, along with real numbers from accounts we have managed.

What Actually Counts as a High-Intent Search Query

A high-intent search query is one where the searcher’s next step is very likely to be a purchase, a call, or a form submission, not more research. The distinction matters because Google’s own broad match algorithm frequently groups high-intent and low-intent searches together under the same keyword, and the only way to separate them is to actually read your search terms report line by line.

Here is a real, simplified example from a Toronto plumbing client we manage. Under the broad keyword “plumber Toronto,” their account was matching to:

• “emergency plumber Toronto 24 hour” (high intent, searcher has a burst pipe right now)
• “how to become a plumber in Toronto” (zero intent, this is a career search)
• “plumber Toronto reviews” (medium intent, comparison stage)
• “plumber Toronto salary” (zero intent)

Before we took over the account, roughly 22 percent of that client’s monthly spend was going to clicks from searches like the second and fourth examples above, which will never produce a customer. That is not a small leak. Across a $4,000 monthly budget, that is roughly $880 a month spent on searches with no commercial intent whatsoever.

The Four-Step Process We Use to Rebuild an Account Around Intent

Step 1: Pull the Full Search Terms Report, Not Just the Keyword List

Most accounts we inherit have never had anyone actually read the search terms report, the list of the literal words someone typed before their ad was shown. The keyword list you set up in the campaign is not the same as what Google actually matches you to, especially with broad and phrase match types. We pull a minimum of 90 days of search term data before making any changes, because a shorter window can be skewed by seasonality.

Step 2: Categorize Every Search Term Into Intent Tiers

We sort every search term into one of three buckets: transactional (ready to buy or book now), comparative (researching options, likely to convert with the right offer), and informational (research only, unlikely to convert soon). For a home services or professional services client, transactional terms usually include words like “emergency,” “same day,” “near me,” “cost,” “quote,” and “book.” Informational terms usually include “how to,” “what is,” “DIY,” and “salary” or “career” style modifiers.

Step 3: Rebuild Campaign Structure Around Those Tiers

Rather than one broad campaign covering a whole service, we split budget into separate campaigns by intent tier, with transactional campaigns getting the largest share of budget and the tightest match types, usually exact and phrase match only. Informational terms either get cut entirely from paid campaigns and redirected to organic content strategy, or get a token budget with a much lower target cost per click.

Step 4: Build and Maintain an Aggressive Negative Keyword List

This is the step most accounts we inherit have skipped almost entirely. We add negative keywords weekly for at least the first two months of any new account rebuild, then monthly after that. For the plumbing client mentioned above, adding negatives for “salary,” “how to become,” “training,” “course,” and “jobs” alone eliminated that 22 percent wasted spend within the first three weeks.

Want us to run this same audit on your account, free, before you commit to anything? Book a call with Canada Create and bring your current Google Ads login. We will show you exactly where the leaks are.

Real Results From an Intent-Focused Rebuild

Here is the before and after from that same plumbing client’s account, three months after the rebuild:

| Metric | Before Rebuild | After Rebuild (Month 3) |

|—|—|—|

| Monthly ad spend | $4,000 | $4,000 (unchanged) |

| Cost per click (average) | $6.80 | $5.10 |

| Conversion rate | 3.1% | 8.4% |

| Cost per lead | $71 | $22 |

| Qualified leads per month | 18 | 63 |

The budget did not change. What changed was where that budget was allowed to go. This is the part that surprises business owners most when we walk them through an audit: the fix was rarely “spend more,” it was “stop spending on the wrong searches.”

We see a similar pattern across almost every industry we manage ads for, legal, dental, real estate, home services. The exact high-intent phrases differ by industry, but the underlying discipline is identical: read the actual search terms, tier them by intent, and stop letting broad match decide your budget allocation for you.

Common Mistakes That Undo This Kind of Rebuild

A few mistakes we see repeatedly, even among accounts that start with a good intent-based structure:

Letting Google’s automated bidding “smart” features override manual match type discipline. Automated bidding tools are useful, but if you turn on broad match expansion features without watching the search terms report weekly, the account drifts back toward low-intent traffic within a couple of months.

Treating negative keyword lists as a one-time setup task instead of ongoing maintenance. Search behavior shifts, new irrelevant queries show up constantly, and an account that had a clean negative list in January can be leaking budget again by April if nobody is checking.

Optimizing purely for cost per click instead of cost per qualified lead. A cheaper click that never converts is more expensive than an expensive click that does. We have taken over accounts where a previous agency was proud of driving down average CPC while conversion rate had quietly collapsed.

How This Applies Beyond Google Search Ads

The same intent-tiering logic applies to Performance Max campaigns and Microsoft Advertising accounts, though both require slightly different tools since neither gives you the same level of search term visibility that standard Google Search campaigns do. Performance Max in particular has drawn criticism industry-wide for its lack of transparency into exactly which searches and placements triggered a given ad, and we treat any Performance Max campaign with caution until we can layer in enough conversion tracking and asset-level reporting to judge intent quality indirectly.

For clients running both Search and Performance Max, we typically recommend keeping Performance Max budget capped until the Search campaigns have been fully rebuilt around intent tiers, since a bloated, low-intent Search campaign will also poison the audience signals Performance Max uses to find similar users. Fix the foundation first, then expand.

We have had more than one client come to us after a different provider recommended shifting their entire budget into Performance Max as a shortcut. In two cases we reviewed, cost per lead nearly doubled within the first six weeks of that shift, because the campaign had no clean intent signal to learn from. Untangling that mess took longer than building an intent-based Search campaign would have taken from scratch.

Getting Started

If your Google Ads account has not had a real search terms audit in the last 90 days, there is a very good chance you are funding some version of the “salary” and “how to become” problem right now without knowing it. This is one of the fastest wins we deliver for new clients, often visible within the first month of a rebuild.

Reach out to Canada Create for a free account audit. We will pull your search terms report, show you exactly where the waste is, and give you a plan, whether or not you decide to work with us afterward.

We would rather give an honest audit that costs us a sale today than let a business keep bleeding budget on searches that were never going to convert. That approach has been slower for growing this agency than aggressive upselling would have been, but it is also why clients tend to stay with us for years rather than months, and why word of mouth remains one of our largest sources of new business. If you want a second opinion on an account that is not performing the way it should, that offer stands regardless of who built the campaigns originally.

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About the author

Amir Vincent, CEO of Canada Create, has managed Google Ads accounts for Toronto small businesses since 2008, with a focus on cutting wasted spend before increasing budget.

Canada Create, 126 Willowdale Ave Suite #3, North York, ON M2N 4Y2. Call 416-273-9030.