The maritime negative keyword list that wastes most paid budgets

Open the search terms report on almost any maritime Google Ads account that has been running for more than six months and you will find the same pattern: between 15% and 40% of spend has gone to queries that nobody on the buying side ever ran. Students working on dissertations, prospective seafarers researching cadetship and apprenticeship paths, journalists writing pieces, general curiosity searches and adjacent industries (logistics, supply chain, freight forwarding) that share vocabulary but aren’t your commercial buyers.

A disciplined negative keyword list closes that leak. Below is the categorisation we apply to every maritime account before it goes live.

Career and employment noise

Maritime career queries are high volume and almost never represent a buyer. Block them universally:

• jobs, job, vacancy, vacancies, careers, career, hiring, hire me
• salary, salaries, pay, wage, wages
• cv, resume, cover letter
• cadet, cadetship, apprentice, apprenticeship, internship
• training, course, courses, college, university, school, degree, diploma, certificate
• stcw, gmdss, dp1, dp2 (when used in training context)
• crew jobs, seafarer jobs, officer jobs, engineer jobs, deck jobs

That last cluster is worth its own pass. “Crew” and “seafarer” appear in legitimate buyer queries (crew management, crewing services) so blocking them outright will throttle real traffic. Block them only in the compound forms (“crew jobs”, “seafarer salary”).

Academic and definitional noise

Useful for the occasional brand impression, useless for pipeline:

• meaning, definition, define, what is, what are, how does, how do
• wikipedia, encyclopedia
• pdf, ppt, presentation, slideshare
• thesis, dissertation, research paper, journal article
• examples, types of, list of, history of

The “what is” cluster catches enormous volumes of low-intent searches. A query like “what is ship management” is almost never run by a fleet director. Fleet directors know what ship management is.

Adjacent-industry noise

Maritime shares vocabulary with several adjacent sectors. The buyers and budgets do not transfer:

• amazon, ebay, alibaba (consumer marketplaces using “ship” terms)
• delivery, courier, parcel, package, postage
• removal, removals, moving company, relocate, relocation
• cruise (for B2B campaigns; cruise consumer queries flood B2B accounts otherwise)
• fishing, angler, charter fishing (unless you actually serve commercial fisheries)
• yacht, yachting (unless you serve superyacht; otherwise treat as consumer)

The cruise and yacht terms in particular generate huge volumes for any account targeting “ship” or “marine” terms. Block them at account level unless they are part of your offer.

Geographic noise

Useful for any account not actually operating globally:

• block country names where you do not serve (often forty or fifty countries’ worth)
• block city names of well-known maritime hubs you do not operate in (Singapore, Hong Kong, Houston, Rotterdam, Piraeus, Hamburg, Dubai)

This is the unglamorous one but it stops a lot of irrelevant clicks from queries like “ship management Singapore” when you are a Northern European operation only.

The match-type tax

A negative keyword on broad match catches more variants but also blocks legitimate traffic. Use phrase and exact for most negatives. Reserve broad-match negatives for the unambiguous noise (jobs, salary, wikipedia) where there is no plausible buyer query that contains the term.

What the recovery looks like

A maritime account without a curated negative list is paying Google to deliver the wrong audience. Fixing it usually recovers between 10% and 25% of monthly budget within four weeks, and the recovered budget converts at a far higher rate because it lands on the searches that were always there but were being crowded out.