Affiliate marketers are known for their impressive ability to have their ducks in a row. Whatever problem pops up, it is met with a sword and a shield, and the fortress of an impeccable advertising campaign is protected from all flanks. However, it is always easy to miscalculate and underestimate the use of keywords — but you won’t make this mistake. Not with the short guide helping you navigate Google’s Keyword Planner.
What is Google Keyword Planner?
Google has always been on top, providing exceptional tools that can contribute to your advertising campaign. Google Keyword Planner tool is just another option that can help you elevate your business and bring it to another level.
Essentially, Google Keyword Planner is a free research tool on the Google Ads platform that finds relevant keywords both for ads and your website, ensuring that they will reach the right audience. As expected, it is not the only benefit of the platform. Apart from this, Google Keyword Planner can answer the most vital questions every affiliate brings up while compiling a perfect ad campaign:
What search terms do people use in Google?
How popular are these terms?
How much do they cost?
We've just given you a brief outline of what this amazing tool can do, and now is the time to delve a little deeper. Step by step.
Setting Up Google Keyword Planner
Are you feeling driven to punch in the query Google keyword planner how to use? Suppress this urge for a moment because we are ready to tell you how to use Google keyword planner.
Here's your step-by-step instruction.
- Go to the Google Keyword Planner URL.
- Log in to or create your Google account.
- Switch on Expert mode.
- While using Google Ads, go to Tools => Planning => Keyword Planner.
Discovering New Keywords
You’ve logged in, you’ve found the right tab, and you might be feeling a crawling sense of suspicion: is Google Keyword planner free? How such a wonderful tool can be distributed free of charge to anyone who’s interested in its services? Well, good news: it is free and you can indeed use it to your advantage.
Once you open the tab, you are faced with two different tools unfurling before your eyes: Discover New Keywords and Get search volume and forecasts. Each serves its purpose quite well, but for now, let us focus on the first option.
When clicked, the window "Discover New Keywords" breaks down into two sections:
Start With Keywords. If you choose this, the platform will provide keyword ideas based on the words and phrases that describe your business, say, sneakers, or ayurveda, yoga, fashion, gadgets, and so forth. In short, this approach allows you to access Google's internal database of keywords tailored for different industries.
Start With a Website. Ads user nation, rise up! This tool is said to scan the domain of choice and supply keyword ideas gathered on your site or your competitor's source.
When you're done, click Get Results.
Analyzing and Filtering Keywords
Once the results are in, look at them more closely because you will have to narrow them down to create the perfect list of terms that fits your business goals and expectations. Technically, you can avoid that, but in reality, such refinement is absolutely indispensable as it helps you focus on relevant keywords and increase your chances of reaching the desired audience.
Examine the top of the page and make a mental note of the funnel image below the Broaden your search bar.
Go to the Add Filter section and press the Keyword button to filter for keywords that include or exclude a particular word or phrase.
If you started with keywords in the previous step, you can discover the most commonly used terms in the Refine Keywords section. Click Expand All and remove the tick alongside all irrelevant terms to get rid of the corresponding keywords in the results, or, on the contrary, include keywords by attributes like color, style, or brand.
Identifying Low-Competition Keywords
Before we switch to some other topic that would include an answer to the question Google Keyword Planner how it works, we should dwell a little longer on low-competition keywords that can make a huge difference.
Low-competition keywords, also known as low-difficulty keywords, are the terms with a lower competition rate among companies: in short, fewer websites compete for them. Less competition means bigger gain, so if you try these, you may succeed and rank high without putting too much time and effort into the endeavor.
Any professional strives to optimize their page so well that the content there targets low-competition keywords for better visibility and higher rankings, that's what we've said already. However, we haven't yet mentioned the exact steps you should take to achieve excellent results. Rectifying our mistake right here.
- Build a list of keywords. First, you should enter your competitor's domain and draw up a list of terms your competitor uses to rank in Google's top 100 organic search results.
- Filter and select. Once this task is accomplished, identify the keywords with a low difficulty percentage. The words you picked should be added to another list.
- Find long-tail queries. Long-tail queries are absolutely indispensable and should be compared between domains. Define the low-competition keywords in the comparison.
- Expand your list. Discover question-based queries, related phrases and terms, and variations you have not added yet, and include them in the list.
- Filter for low-competition keywords. Once your perfect list is created and waiting to be employed, filter for low-competition terms and sort by volume to unearth unparalleled, low-difficulty opportunities.
Finding Trending and Seasonal Keywords
Seasonal keywords are another trick that can help you rank higher on the result page: for example, the query Christmas gifts for a friend will be popular in the winter, getting 50,000 searches in December and only 150 searches in March, April, or May. The same goes for Black Friday, Halloween costumes, and many other queries tied to a particular season.
Luckily, Keyword Planner is on your side and sports a remarkable Three Month Change metric. As the name implies, this metric shows a three-month change in search trends by comparing last month's data to the data that was relevant two months prior. Seasonal topics can be discovered if you sort keyword ideas by this column from highest to lowest.
We didn't mention Christmas gifts as mere rhetoric. In fact, we intended to illustrate the situation with this bright example. People are commonly known to give sweaters as Christmas presents, so you can safely expect this situation in your search results in October, November, and December:
Utilizing Keyword Ideas
Google Keyword Planner is a wonderful tool that can automate a plodding process and provide hard data to elevate your business and inspire you to look at your niche from a different angle.
However, this tool is not impeccable. You're already aware of the ways to utilize the ideas enumerated in previous steps, but here's a thing: you are not the only one. Keyword Planner is an exceptionally popular tool used by specialists in all GEOs and all verticals, so only the most gullible beginners can believe that the ideas they get are unique. In effect, you have to refine the ideas and narrow down the list, otherwise you will end up with highly competitive terms that will most likely flop.
Fortunately, you can bypass that issue because we have a contingency.
Scroll up to the Discover New Keywords section and choose Start with a website. This time, refrain from entering a keyword: try a URL instead.
That's how it works: you insert a link leading to another website in your niche, so instead of weight loss, use, for example, OC's Weight Loss center's site.
It may seem like a cheap trick, but even if so, it works, and most of your competitors will never encounter the results evinced in the new list of terms.
Unsurprisingly though, you can utilize even more unique keywords if you use other pages, regardless of their genre:
Conference agendas;
Influencer pages;
Blog posts;
Success stories;
Podcast transcripts.
Technically, any page can be of assistance if it is related to your business.
Google Keyword Planner for SEO
Google Keyword Planner is an indispensable tool when it comes to SEO, as it helps you discover the keywords — along with the perfect opportunities — that best align with your needs, strategies, and approaches, supplying every specialist with unique insights. These insights, however, are not the only benefit, although it is certainly one of the most vital ones:
Data-driven insights provided by Google Keyword Planner demonstrate the volume of searches for the keyword of interest, correspondingly exhibiting the competition level and potential traffic flow you could attract.
Competitive analysis is a significant research you should conduct to schedule a successful ad campaign. Google Keyword Planner effortlessly reveals the keywords targeted by your competitors, allowing you to adjust your strategy based on the readouts.
Budget management is a positive side-effect that will help you identify the best costs and the amount of money that should be allotted for SEO endeavors.
Content development is inevitable when you comprehend what your target audience searches. Tailoring your posts to meet your audience's needs will eventually increase your engagement and conversion rates.
Overall SEO strategy refinement will enhance your ranking on SERPs as you will have optimized your tags, content, headings, and other SEO components.
As you can see, the tool equips you with unadulterated knowledge and a pristine understanding of SERP ranking, bestowing on you an opportunity to capture more organic traffic. Here's the instruction:
- Go back to the Start with Keywords section, enter a few terms related to your topic, and click on Get Results;
- Customize your search by filtering the results: choose your target language, location, and search network;
- Parse the results and evaluate the keywords you see:
- Filter by relevance;
- Identify relevant short-tail and long-tail keywords;
- Discover low competition and high volume.
4. Export your data for further analysis by downloading keyword ideas and adding them to your spreadsheet.
Google Keyword Planner for PPC
With PPC campaigns, the approach is different. First, you should get acquainted with the search intent, investigating what goal the user is trying to achieve. Are they looking for a particular page or website? Or, perhaps, they're eager to learn more about a certain subject? Their passionate desire to conduct research before making a purchase is not likely either, is it? Isn't it also possible that the person is searching for the right product to buy?
Once you define which terms align best with your strategy and ads, save them. To do this, you should check the boxes alongside the relevant keywords and click Add keywords to create plan.
You can access the saved keywords whenever you need by clicking the Saved Keywords tab.
As in the case of SEO, your next step is to evaluate PPC keywords, using the four metrics provided by the tool to estimate costs and measure ad competition rates.
- Competition (indexed value.) This metric uses a scale of 0 – 100 and implies the percentage of available ad spots that are normally filled. As you can guess, the higher the number, the trickier it will be to get this spot.
- Top of bid (low range.) You deal with the lower end of what advertisers bid for the top ad spot, giving you a rough understanding of the minimum CPC here.
- Top of page bid (high range.) Opposite to the previous indicator, it reflects the higher end of the bid for the top ad spot. Correspondingly, it lets you estimate the maximum CPC.
- Competition. If there is not enough hard data, you will see a “–”; in other cases, the estimation may be Low, Medium, or High. In general, the metric demonstrates the ratio of advertisers bidding on this keyword relative to other keywords.
Advanced Tips and Tricks
You've handled it perfectly. While Google Keyword Planner is not an excruciatingly complicated tool that can put Adobe Photoshop to shame, it still requires some expertise — or at least your powerful desire to learn and develop professionally. You will undoubtedly master the basics in no time, so it feels right to smoothly segue to more complex, advanced strategies that will ensure your success and burnish your keyword optimization skills.
Unlocking Exact Search Volumes
Google Keyword Planner is a versatile service that can come up to almost any expectation in almost any regard, and this feature is one of the most useful in the entire platform. Unfortunately, Google has been reluctant to demonstrate exact search volumes, which caused SEO specialists to forego this feature and switch to more accommodating services in this respect, but you can rely on us — and our expertise.
To unlock exact search volumes to have a clearer picture of your advertising landscape, start with Get search volume and forecasts.
Once you're there, click the Forecast tab and click the arrow on the right to expose the graph, where you can encounter the maximum CPC on the graph. Click it, too.
Viewing Local Search Trends
Another trick up the sleeve is local search trends, which are often overlooked by specialists, as keyword research tools tend to hide this information on average — or they don't have it in the first place.
Google Keyword Planner makes this goal attainable, and you won't even have to look for the vague arrow that would reveal a graph in the tab no one ever pays attention to. The only thing you have to do is to change your location above and choose the city or the country that attracts your attention. Once it's done, you will be able to acknowledge local volume ranges.
You can switch between different locations to compare the range and combine this trick with the previous one for more precision.
Identifying Popular Search Locations
The Google Keyword Planner platform is enabled with another feature that can change your perception of business and educate you on the subject of keywords even further, offering a most unique tool of all. Not only does it provide three-month forecasts, but it also exhibits the most popular search location for any term that you find intriguing.
Scroll down to the bottom of the Forecasts tab to see the impressions for your keywords and delve deeper if necessary by applying filters.
Understanding Device-Specific Searches
We're not leaving the Forecasts tab, not yet: there's something else every specialist should know.
It might not seem like an important fact, but you should implement your everyday observations into work, and this observation is one of the crucial factors that can determine your success. As you undoubtedly know, modern people are focused on smartphones, and mobile optimization has been a ranking factor for years. In some cases, the importance of mobile optimization surpasses other requirements.
So, if you want to understand your audience a little better and adjust your content, you should check whether people search this query on computers, tablets, or smartphones.
Certainly, you absolutely cannot do without examples. We're happy to oblige and provide one: most users will enter the query free tool to edit pdf from their computer, but impressions on restaurants near me mostly come from smartphones.
Conclusion
Google Keyword Planner is a powerful platform that can simplify your working process and elevate your keyword research flow, incorporating new tactics into this trite and well-known routine. Data-driven insights, optimization tips, valuable forecasts, and other features make this tool an absolutely irreplaceable option for any expert who wants to attain their personal goals and scale up their business.
However, this platform cannot be called impeccable: there are a few limitations that can affect your perception and warp the real marketing situation, so it always requires a decent counterpart program that could fill the blanks and accomplish the tasks Google Keyword Planner fails to complete.
