How to use the Google Keyword Planner tool
for SEO research as well as running a Google Ad campaign.
That's what we're going to be talking about in this video.
Hi, my name is Ilana from Teach Traffic.com recording a video
for measureschool.com. Now, keyword research is a really big topic,
but in this video, we're going to touch on how you can use
the Google Keyword Planner tool for keyword research.
And if you stay through to the end of this video, I'm going to show you two
additional free tools that I personally use to expand my keyword research ideas.
So let's get stuck right in.
So here we are in our live Google Ad account.
And to do keyword research,
we're going to be using what's called the Keyword Planner.
Okay, so you log into your Google Ad account, you go to Tools and Settings,
and you go to the planning section and go to Keyword Planner.
And that will bring you to this page.
If you have a brand new Google Ad account that's never spent any money on ads
and doesn't have any campaigns, I haven't put any billing, et cetera,
it's going to be restricted in some of the data that it gives you.
So just know that going in.
But hopefully you're doing this with an existing Google Ad account.
So when we get to this screen,
we've really got two main options that we can do.
We can do this option one, which is to discover new keywords where we
put in a base number of keywords as a starting point.
And then Google will go and find similar
keywords related to the keywords that we put in or we can use.
We can sort of upload keyword list and get sort of search volume and forecasts.
Okay, so it really comes down to what is
your goal from doing your keyword research?
For most people, keyword research is for creating a Google Ad campaign.
But I also know that many people do keyword research for SEO purposes.
So really, either of those, you're going to be looking to discover new keywords.
Okay. So that's where most people will start.
And here you're given two really main options is to start with keywords.
As I said before, you put in a bunch of sort of key keywords
that you think are related to whatever it is you're trying to promote.
And you can put up to ten keywords.
Or you can also kind of if you're really
unsure of a starting point, you can just put in a website,
your own website, or even your competitors website.
And Google will sort of crawl your website
and then find keywords based on the content on the page.
Okay, so I'm going to go through both of those options.
So let's first start with keywords.
So for the purpose of this video, let's pretend that we want to be sending
traffic to this retargeting challenge course that we sell.
So this is a course teaching you how to do retargeting on Google and Facebook.
So obviously those are the kinds of keywords that I am going to select.
So I would do retargeting course and I separate my keywords by comma.
I'd also say remarketing course because that's sort of used interchangeably.
I could also say Google Ad retargeting.
I could say Facebook
retargeting and I could say how to set up retargeting because
that would be people who are also wanting tutorials on how to do that.
I could also say retargeting tutorials or tutorial.
I can do remarket. Anyway, you get the idea.
Okay.
And I'm just giving Google some keywords to give me data on these keywords but also
give me other ideas for possible keywords that I would like.
I can change the location here.
Let's say I'm going to advertise in the United States.
Going to remove Australia.
So you would put in whatever country you'd like.
And as a starting point we can just hit get results.
Okay, here are the keywords that I put in here.
These are any of the settings that I wish to change.
So if I want to change location, I can just change location like I just did
before going to leave it as is and I can select the last twelve months of data or I
can say the last 24 and so I'll just leave it as is.
Okay.
So scrolling down here are the keywords that I have entered here and then here are
additional keyword ideas that Google is giving me.
Okay.
So let me just get rid of this because I just want to show you more.
There's a chart obviously here which shows
me the total number of traffic split by mobile versus desktop.
So really you can see the difference in the chart.
I would say it's very much a desktop inquiry.
So if we take the first keyword
of retargeting course, because it's an existing Google Ad
account, it actually gives me actual average monthly search data.
As I said at the start of the video, if you've got a brand new account that's
never spent any money on ads, doesn't have billing set up,
you'd probably get a range zero to 1000 monthly searches.
So if you are seeing that, then that's why.
But hopefully you are seeing more data.
And I guess really what I'm looking for here is I really like to look at these
charts to see how it trends over time and that sort of had nothing and then it
suddenly had a spike and this sort of fluctuate somewhat.
But these are really low numbers.
But here at least there's constant traffic.
There's 720 approximately people searching for it.
But there's been somewhat consistent, a little bit of fluctuations.
Okay.
And it's going to give us three month change in volume year on year change.
The competition is how competitive this
keyword is in terms of how many other people are bidding on it.
And this is all sort of various other data.
I have to be honest with you, I find a lot of this data largely useless.
And I actually find especially the top
of page bid and these bid ranges to be largely inaccurate.
Actually, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's what you are going to pay
on a cost per click basis because there's so many factors that go into this device
bidding location, targeting your quality score in your account, et cetera.
So I actually ignore these numbers here.
And we will often have many keywords in an account that are even below first
page bid but still get a ton of traffic just because that keyword has a lot
of volume and it doesn't make sense for us to bid top dollar.
So my view here is really the point of this is to get a real raw data set
of keywords that we want to essentially target.
So here are the keyword ideas that Google is giving us based on what we Typed in.
It's giving us 258 keyword ideas also filter out some of this information.
Okay. So if I just scroll down here
and I might have a look for keywords that I kind of don't think are that relevant.
And I might think of ideas that I can filter out people.
So, for example, we can create a filter here.
We can say keyword.
Let's say I definitely want to have
keyword that contains remarketing or retargeting.
Okay. Because that's what this course is about.
So I hit Apply and it has refined our search.
And you can see then the keyword ideas
that I've got here must have that word remarketing or retargeting in the keyword.
So you can refine your keyword list by doing this.
And you can also add in other filters.
Maybe you want to have a look for average monthly searches greater than equal to 50.
Okay.
So we click Apply and that's going to filter our list even more.
Okay.
But you might find actually that it's not really that relevant.
So if you want to get rid of it, just click close, close.
And obviously you can do other filters if you want.
Personally, what I like to do is I like to download this data into a Google sheet.
So it's going to download it into my drive.
I'm going to hit download it's, just preparing this report.
And then I'm going to open this sheet.
So what we're going to do is we're going
to just clean up this spreadsheet a little bit.
So I'm going to just get rid of these two top two rows.
Okay. I'm going to do this.
I'm going to get rid of the currency column.
Okay.
And then I'm going to actually first I've got to make this column a number
and then I'm going to select all and then create a filter.
And basically what I'm doing is I'm
ranking by search volume because I want to see which of the keywords get
the highest amount of traffic that I can then use these keywords,
these keywords to build out my Google Ad campaign or my SEO strategy or whatever is
my goal for doing this keyword research process.
The other option here, we click on this and we go start with a website.
As I said before, this is the challenge.
I'm going to copy this URL and I'm going to put in the URL here.
So use only this page rather than the entire site.
Okay.
So I click Get results and obviously Google's going to crawl this page and give
ideas on possible keywords that we can use and it's come up with 479 keywords.
Once again we can do our filter right
where the keyword must contain remarketing or Retargeting.
We hit apply and it's going to have filtered these for us as well.
And then once again we can download this
data into a Google sheet and it's only got 55 of the keywords that we want.
That's okay.
So we download this data again and we can add that to our keyword list.
We open this in sheets and we do exactly the same process.
Okay, so really that is how I use this Keyword Planner tool.
Obviously there are other ways things that you can do.
I create what's called a keyword plan and use it to really build a campaign off
the back of that you can sort of add keywords here.
Personally I don't do that.
I build my campaign sort of in Excel and then we upload it through AdWords Editor.
But really this is just giving you a very
basic overview of how to use this keyword Planner.
I want to also quickly show you a couple of other tools that I use that are free
tools that you can use for keyword research.
So one of my favorite tools is called soovle.com and here it will pull
in information from all these different search engines.
So here we can do the same thing.
And as I'm typing it is going to be
populating as you can see as I'm typing retargeting course.
Or we can do retargeting
tutorial and this is going to give us ideas based on Yahoo or YouTube.
And this is Google obviously.
And you can just use this to find additional keyword ideas.
And another tool that I like to use is
called answerthepublic.com where I might type in remarketing or Retargeting.
It doesn't matter.
We click search and it's going to give us common questions
that people ask on whatever we've Typed in.
Okay, so here we can have a look and we see where is remarketing in AdWords?
What remarketing audiences cannot whatever that means.
What is remarketing?
Google analytics.
Why marketing or this is marketing?
They've mixed it remarketing.
What are remarketing services?
Anyway, you get the idea if I Scroll down.
So this gives us additional content idea as well as keyword ideas that we can
really create our Google Ad campaign around.
So have a play around with those two tools.
Have a play around with the keyword
planner and yeah, let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for watching. All right.
Thanks Ilana for this great information.
If this video helps you out then please
hit that like button so we can share it more to other people.
And if you want to find out more about
AdWords tracking analytics, then check out this playlist right over
there and from everybody here at measureschool.
Happy measuring.