If you are looking for more ways to get traffic to your website from Google, you will need to understand what people are searching for. The most efficient way to understand this is by doing keyword research. Luckily for us, Google offers a free keyword research tool that allows you to understand the popularity of Keywords, known as the Google Keyword Planner.
This guide will help you understand how to use Google Keyword Planner to get more traffic to your website. Let’s have a look at the steps:
Access the tool
One of the best things about google keyword planner is that it’s free for everyone, but you do need to create a Google Ads account before you can start using the tool. If you do not have an account, creating one will take only a few minutes.
Once you have your Google Ads account set up, log in to your account and click on the ‘Tools’ icon on the top right corner. From there, choose ‘Keyword Planner’. Next, you will have two options to go with, both have their own functionalities: “Discover new keywords” and “Get search volume and forecasts”.
In general, this tool is designed for PPC advertisers in mind, but if you are looking for keywords that focus on SEO at the same time, these two tools will be more than enough to generate hundreds of keywords for your website. Since this is mainly for PPC advertisers, there might be some features (such as bidding) that are not useful for people who are just looking for SEO focused keywords.
Choose a tool
Once you open the keyword planner, you will be introduced to two kinds of keyword tools, lets look at how each one can be beneficial for your project.
Discover New Keywords
If your goal is to find new keywords, go with this one. Inside the tool, you will find two ways to discover new keywords. The first one, “Start with keywords” uses your products and services to identify new keywords that can help you rank your website. The second one “Start with Website” that uses the home page of the content from a website to find new useful keywords.
Start by entering products or services that your business is closely related to, you have the option to enter more than one keyword in the search field, by placing a comma in between each keyword. For example, if you own an eCommerce website that sells computer peripherals, you can enter terms such as “gaming mice” or “4K Monitor”, etc.
You can also add your homepage to use as a filter for the results, though this tool is mainly designed for Adword users, you can still benefit from it. Once have all the relevant keywords entered in the field just click on “Get Results”.
You will see a page that will contain all the relevant keywords that you can use for your website. Before jumping forwards and learning how to use this list, let’s look at the other tool that we mentioned in the beginning.
Get search volume and forecasts
If you already have the list of keywords, you can use this one to understand how each keyword is performing. In simple words, you cannot generate new keywords from this but will be able to see the search volumes for each keyword on your list.
Operating this tool is really easy, all you have to do is enter the list of keywords you have and click “Get Started”. You also have the option to upload a file that contains your keywords as well. After you click ‘get started’, you will see the result page with detailed information about each keyword you entered.
Now that you know what each tool can be used for, let’s jump in the next step to understand how to utilize the list of keyword you just discovered.
Filter Results
It is important to understand that not every keyword you discovered needs to be used. You will need to tone down your results to a smaller list containing only the best one out of the whole lot.
On the results page, you will notice that there are four kinds of targeting options, i.e. Locations, Language, Search networks, and Date. From the ‘location’ you can choose the countries that you want to market to, With ‘Language’, you can choose the language of keyword that you want more information on. For example, if you want to see results in French, choose that as the language.
‘Search networks’ is for people who would like to choose where they want to advertise on. If you are just looking for keywords for your SEO, you should just leave it on “Google”.
‘Date Range’ is to see how the keyword performed in a certain period of time. Leaving it on the default option will work.
Use the “Add Filter” option to filter out the list using various option it offers, Such as:
- Keyword Text
- Exclude Keywords in My Account
- Exclude Adult Ideas
- Average Monthy searches
- Competition
- Ad Impression share
- Top of Page Bid
- Organic Average Position
Analyze Keywords
After you are done with filtering out the results based on your preference, let’s see how you can analyze the “keyword ideas” section.
Keywords(by relevance)
Choosing this will sort your results that are most relevant to the keywords or website you entered during the beginning.
Average monthly searches
This will contain a range of average monthly searches for a keyword. Keep in mind they are not always accurate indicators of volume.
Competition
If you aiming for SEO, then this filter is not much use for you, since it depicts the number of competitors that are bidding on a specific keyword.
Top of Page Bid
This can be a great factor when choosing a keyword since a higher bid can indicate more chances of profit with a keyword.
Choose Your Keywords
Now that you know how the tool works, its time to choose the best keywords that you can start optimizing on your website. But this can get tricky sometimes since there are so many keywords that might hold the potential to generate high traffic. And there are so many ways you can choose your keywords.
But here is one of them that can work. First, use the first tool “Discover New Keywords” to find new keywords for your business or website. Make sure you enter some relevant keywords that closely describe your business or service.
Once you have the list of new keywords, filter, and choose based on three criteria:
Search volume
There is no point of investing in keywords if they do not have any search volume, it can take a very long time for them to perform well for you, and the chances of getting high traffic is pretty low. So, choose the ones that have higher search volume on average.
Commercial Intent
The keywords that people have searched for with an intention to buy or sell something.
Organic SEO Competition
This can take some time to discover, but it is worth the effort. Higher competitions usually mean more traffic opportunities.
