If you are running a campaign for let’s say an SEO Agency to get more leads, using exact match keywords such as ‘seo agency’ would you add generic search terms such as ‘seo’ or ‘search engine optimisation’ as negative keywords or not include them in the campaign?
Tl;dr: should i exclude ‘seo’ and ‘search engine optimisation’ if im trying to get seo clients?
If you use [SEO agency] your ads shouldn’t trigger on just “SEO” or other non-specific queries. There is always a chance it could as Google has relaxed matching quite a bit but unlikely.
I’d wait and scan your search queries reports, only block them if they are showing up there.
But fundamentally, yes you probably don’t want your ads showing for SEO which is way too broad, i.e. could simply be people wanting to learn about SEO.