There’s no way around it: without objective data, keyword
research is a shot in the dark.
Fortunately, the SEO Gods have given us an awesome (free)
tool that tells us almost everything we need to make informed decisions…
…decisions about which keywords are best for our business.
It’s called the Google Keyword Planner (formerly known as
the Google Keyword Tool).
Sound cool?
It is.
Keep in mind that the tool is designed with Adwords
advertisers in mind. So there are a lot of features in the tool (like keyword
bidding features) that won’t be useful for you.
In this guide I’ll show you how to get the most SEO value
out of the Google Keyword Planner.
Here’s how to use it.
STEP #1: ACCESS THE GOOGLE KEYWORD
PLANNER
In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need to
have a Google Adwords account. If you don’t have an Adwords account already,
you can set one up in a few minutes here:
(Just follow the prompts, enter some information about you
and your business, and you’re in. Note: You don’t have to run an active
campaign to use the GKP. But you’ll need to fully set up an Adwords account).
Next, login to your Google Adwords account. Click on the
wrench icon in the toolbar at the top of the page.
Then, choose “Keyword Planner”:
You’ll be presented with two different tools within the
Google Keyword Planner: “Find New Keywords” and “Get metrics and forecasts for
your keywords”.
Fortunately, for SEO-focused keyword research, these two
tools are enough to generate thousands of potential keywords.
Now it’s time for me to show you how to find keywords using
each of the tools built into the Google Keyword Planner.
STEP #2: CHOOSE YOUR TOOL
Here I’ll show you how to use the two main tools within the
Google Keyword Planner that will land you a fantastic list of keywords for your
SEO campaigns.
Find new keywords
As the name suggests, this tool is ideal for finding new
keywords.
As you can see, the field for this tool says: “Enter words,
phrases, or a URL related to your business”.
Quick Note:
The value you get from the planner is largely based on the information that you
enter here. So you want to be strategic about what you type into this field.
So to help you get the most out of this tool, I’ll break
down each of the 3 options.
“Enter Words”: These
are single words that describe your business (for example, “weight loss” or
“coffee”). This allows you to access Google’s internal database of keywords for
different industries. You can sometimes find keywords here that you might have
missed using the other two options.
“Phrases”:
This is where you enter “seed keywords” and get a list of closely-related
terms. I recommend entering 1-3 keywords here, each in a slightly different
Niche Market. For example, if you ran a cookie ecommerce site, you’d want to
enter terms like “gluten free desserts” and “low carb cookies” here.
“A URL related to your business”: This is primarily for Adwords users. But you can sometimes
find a few solid keywords here using your site’s homepage or an article from
your site.
Once you’ve entered your information into one – or all three
– of the options, click “Get Started”.
Next, you’ll see the Keywords Results Page. I’ll show you
how to use that part of the Google Keyword Planner later in the guide.
For now, let’s dive into the second tool in the GKP: metrics
and forecasts.
Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords
This is a feature that’s useful if you already have a long
list of keywords and just want to check their search volume. In other words,
this tool won’t help you generate new keyword ideas.
Simply copy and paste a list of keywords into the search
field, and hit “Get Started”.
You’ll also see the same Keywords Results Page you see when
you use the “Find new keywords” tool.
The only difference is that a) you only get data on the
keywords you entered and b) Google will predict how many clicks and impressions
you’ll get from the keywords you entered:
With that, let’s dive into the Keywords Results Page.
Step #3: Using the Keywords Results
Page
Both the tools I just described will take you to the
“Keywords Results Page”, which looks like this:
Here’s a breakdown of the page:
At the top of the page, you’ll notice three targeting
options: Locations, Language and Search networks.
Here’s what these three things mean:
“Locations”
This is the country (or countries) that you’re marketing to.
Simple.
“Language”
This is the language of the keywords you want to advertise
on.
“Locations” and “Language” are automatically set to target
English-speaking people in the US searching in Google. If that’s your target
audience (in most cases it will be), you can leave these options as they are.
But let’s say you’re based in Germany. You’d want to change
the Location to “Germany” and choose “German” as the language.
“Search networks”
This is whether or not you want to advertise only on Google…
or Google and their “search partners”. Search partner
sites include other search engines and Google properties (like YouTube).
I recommend leaving this set to just “Google”
.
The next important part of the Keywords Results Page is “Add
Filter”:
As you can see, you get a decent amount of filtering
options. So let me quickly break down each of the options for you.
Keyword Text
Here’s where you can have the tool ONLY show you keywords
that contain a certain word of phrase.
Why would you want to include certain keywords?
Let’s say that you just launched a new line of blue
t-shirts. In that case you’d want to make sure the keyword “blue t-shirt”
appears in all of your keyword suggestions.
Exclude Keywords in My Account
This excludes keywords that you’re already bidding on in
Adwords.
Exclude Adult Ideas
Self-explanatory (I hope).
Avg. Monthly Searches
This is helpful for filtering out super popular keywords
(that tend to be competitive). You may also want to filter out keywords that
don’t get enough searches.
For example, let’s say that you’re not interested in any
keywords with an average monthly search volume below 2,000.
Just click on avg. monthly searches…
…and enter 2000 into the field:
Competition
You can have the Google Keyword Tool only show you keywords
with “Low”, “Medium” or “High” competition.
This score only applies to Adwords competition (not how
competitive the keyword is to rank for). So I recommend leaving this blank.
Ad Impression Share
This only applies to Adwords. So for the sake of SEO, we can
ignore this filter.
Top of Page Bid
This is how much you’d expect to pay for your ad to appear
at the top of the page for that keyword.
Top of Page Bid is a proxy indicator of commercial intent.
So if you only want to target keywords that potential buyers search for, you
can set this to a certain dollar amount.
As you can see, there are two options “high range” and “low
range”.
I recommend using the “low range” as this is just a way to
filter out keywords without any commercial intent.
Organic Impression Share
This is how often your site appears in the organic results
for each keyword. (Note: to use this feature you’ll need to connect your Google
Search Console Account to Google Adwords).
Organic Average Position
Where you rank (on average) for each keyword in Google
organic. You’ll also need to connect to the GSC for this to work.
So that’s it for filtering.
Now that you’ve filtered your results, let’s break down the
actual keyword ideas section:
Here’s what each of the terms in this area mean:
Keyword (by relevance):
This is the list of keywords that Google considers most relevant to the keyword
or URL you typed into it.
Avg. monthly searches:
Pretty self-explanatory. However, keep in mind that this is range…and not a
super-accurate indicator of search volume.
(I’ll show you how to get more accurate search volume data
in a minute).
Also, certain seasonal keywords (like “Halloween costumes”)
may get 50,000 searches in October and 100 searches in May. So the average
monthly searches can be somewhat misleading in some cases.
Competition:
This reflects the number of advertisers bidding on that keyword (you can read
more about how to determine commercial intent in Chapter 4: How to Determine a Keyword’s Commercial
Intent).
Top of Page Bid:
Yet another rock-solid way to size up a keyword’s monetization potential. The
higher bid here, the more lucrative the traffic.
STEP #4: HOW TO CHOOSE KEYWORDS
Now that you know how to use all of the tools, features and
options within the Google Keyword Planner, it’s time for the last step: finding
awesome keywords that you can optimize your site’s content around.
This is tricky.
There are LOTS of factors that go into choosing a keyword.
And it’s more art than science.
That said, I learn best from examples. So I’m going help you
choose a keyword from your list by walking you through an example.
(For this example I’m going to be using the Find new
keywords tool because this is the best tool within the Google Keyword
Planner for finding new keywords).
First, come up with a keyword that’s somewhat broad…but also
describes your product, service or content idea somewhat specifically.
(If you developed a list of Niche Topics from Chapter 1,
those will come in handy here)
For example, let’s say that you run an ecommerce site that
sells organic food.
If you wanted to write a blog post about the health benefits
of organic coffee, you wouldn’t want to use the keyword “coffee” (too
broad) or “health benefits of organic coffee” (too narrow). A keyword like
“organic coffee” would work well.
Enter that keyword into the field and click “Get Started”
And take a look at the keywords that come up:
How do you know which keywords to choose?
There are dozens of different factors to consider, but I
prefer to evaluate keywords based on 3 main criteria:
Search Volume:
Very straightforward. The higher the average search volume, the better the
keyword probably is.
Commercial Intent:
Determining the monetization potential of a keyword is more of an art than a
science. That’s why I’ve created an entire chapter in Keyword Research: The
Definitive Guide — (Chapter 4) – for commercial intent.. In general, the higher the
competition and suggested bid, the easier it will be to convert that traffic
into paying customers.
Organic SEO Competition:
Like commercial intent, evaluating a keyword’s competition in Google’s organic
search results takes some more digging. You need to check out the websites that
are ranking… and see how hard it will be to outrank them. Chapter 5: Keyword Competition Analysis covers everything you need to know about sizing up your
competition.
STEP #5: (OPTIONAL): GET EXACT
KEYWORD SEARCH VOLUME DATA
As I mentioned earlier, the GKP will show you exact search
volume data ONLY if you’re running an active Adwords campaign. Otherwise, you
see a range, like this:
To be honest, the range is actually somewhat-helpful.
Keyword volume fluctuates anyway, so the “exact” average monthly search volume
that you see is a rough average anyway.
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with using these GKP
ranges to help you choose your keywords.
But there’s a nifty trick you can use to get exact search
volume out of the GKP…without needing an active Adwords account.
First, find a keyword in the list of suggestions that you
want to target:
Then click “add to plan”:
Next, in the right-hand sidebar of the page, click “Plan
overview”:
Look at the number of “impressions” you’d get:
That number is how many people search for that keyword every
month.
(In this case, 120k)
And just like that, you now have accurate search volume data
for your keyword. Nice!
BONUS STEP: “THE GKP HACK”
As you saw, the Google Keyword Planner is pretty cool.
That said, the Google Keyword Planner has two major flaws…
Flaw #1: It
only gives you keywords ideas that are VERY closely related to what you type
in.
For example, let’s say your business sells organic food for
pets.
So you type “organic dog food” into the tool. Here’s what
you get:
As you can see, these are VERY close variations of “organic
dog food”, like:
- “natural
dog food”
- “dog
food brands”
- “dog
food”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a fancy tool
to come up with a keyword like “dog food”.
Flaw #2: You get
the same set of keywords everyone else does.
Which means: the keywords the GKP gives you tend to be super
competitive.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way around both of those
frustrating issues: The GKP Hack.
Here’s how to do it.
First, head over to the Find New Keywords area of the GKP:
But instead of entering a keyword, you enter a URL from
another website in your niche.
For example, instead of entering “organic dog food” into the
field, let’s pop in PetSmart’s dog food category page.
Boom!
You get a laundry list of keywords that most of your
competitors will NEVER see.
It gets better…
There are LOTS of other pages that you can use for the GKP
Hack, including:
- Blog
posts
- Press
releases
- Conference
agendas
- Bio
pages of influencers in your industry
- News
stories
- Podcast
transcripts
Basically: any page that has text on it is fair game.
That’s all there is to it. By now you should have a hefty
list of potential keywords. Nice work!
1 Comments
I couldnt leave your website the article was so nicely framed,
ReplyDeleteyou have explained the concept of ppc in a very simple way,
Now a days digital marketing is in boom.Many businesses are running ppc ads and facebook ads in order to promote there products and services.
Now a days we can spy on competitors facebook ads.
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