Google Keyword Planner Tutorial 2026

Key Takeaways

What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today is going to be a quicker Google keyword planner tutorial. So, I'm going to be doing a few tutorials about using the Google keyword planner and especially using some of the specific things inside of it. In this video, I want to just give you a quick overview of the Google keyword planner. So if you have any questions about anything, you can ask them in the comments section, but I will have more content coming out about how to use the keyword planner and keyword research in 2026. So Google keyword planner can be accessed through your Google Ads account. So it does require a Google Ads account to access the Google keyword planner. If you need to create an account, you can. Now in a brand new account, generally you're just going to see ranges of data. So if you go in here and make a search, so if I do meal delivery, the example they have there, you'll see I can broaden my search. But the main thing is they actually give me numbers here for how many average monthly searches there are. In some Google keyword planner versions, if you're not running active ads and you just create a brand new account, then sometimes they're just going to give you ranges of data here. So the workaround is use an active account. The other option is essentially just use the ranges of data. You really don't need exact numbers. I rarely if ever use these exact numbers. And ultimately, if you're targeting something like meal delivery services, for example, then this is very, very broad. And ultimately, you're looking more for keywords that are in that, you know, 100 average monthly searches to 1,000 average monthly searches. And sometimes if you have the range of data, it's really not that big of a deal to see it that way. When you do a search in here in the Google keyword planner, you're going to get a whole lot of things you can look at. So, let's start from the very very beginning of doing an actual search in the Google keyword planner. Now, if you're learning Google Ads right now, I do have a Google Ads course. It is $34.99. It is completely updated for 2026 and I release updated modules constantly throughout the year and I'm going to have a 2027 version. It's a yearly membership. You have access to my course and you will get a ton of content there. So, if you're learning Google Ads, that could be a great way to learn it and kind of go step by step through the process of understanding how Google Ads works. Coming back to my keyword planner here. So, basically what we want to do is we want to start by discovering new keywords. That's going to be the whole point of this video. I'm not going to go through these other two options. I actually don't really use organized keywords into ad groups too often. I actually think AI does this better than any tool does. You could do this very very easily just using any of your favorite AI tools. Getting search volume and forecast can be very useful. So, that's something I'll do in a follow-up video. But, let's start with discover new keywords. So in here when we click on it you have two options. You can start with keywords or start with a website. Within that you can also adjust your location targeting here and you can adjust your language targeting here. If you start with a website you could do the same exact thing. And the other option with a website is you can use the entire website. So I could say surfsidepc.com or you could use a specific page. So I could literally just say okay my Surfside PPC Google Ads course page. I don't know if this will have much to it, but I could actually look up results for an individual page and see what the most relevant keywords. There you go. The most relevant keywords are for this specific page. That seems like way too many keywords for one page. Did I do that right? I think I did a lot of keywords for that page. Surprisingly, this is almost what I would expect them for my whole website. So, let's just say if we do start with our entire website, Surfside PPC. I think we're going to get the same result. Maybe not. Maybe I have a ton of keyword. All right. So, I guess not 2500 keyword ideas. So you could start with an individual page and sometimes that could be really useful. So in a previous video I did a tutorial with this company here. So this is a pest management company based in Myrtle Beach. So you could take an individual page like this and go to your keyword planner, discover new keywords, use only this page and get results. This is for the United States. So you can obviously limit this to the local market that you're targeting. They they must have expanded this because usually you get a much smaller set of keywords. This is thinking way too much. Yeah. So this So the page is not working as well as it used to. So really it almost looks like it's using the entire website. But what's good about the page is it should keep it more limited to what that actual page is about. So like with the Surfside PPC Google Ads course, this used to kind of give you like 20 keywords. Now it's giving us a thousand. But it should be keywords that are the most relevant for this. It's probably just more examples of goo Google's keywords actually expanding in terms of the amount of things that they match. you know, when it comes to an actual targeted keyword. Okay. And coming back to our main screen here, if we discover new keywords, again, sometimes when I use a website, it is for an individual landing page, if I'm looking for specific keywords and things like that that I really want to target. So, that's one option when it comes to starting with a website is saying, okay, my client does commercial pest control. My client does, you know, this specific medical procedure. You know, we're targeting something specific. So using a specific page on our website that we've already created can help us find the most relevant keywords for that and also some really close synonyms and things that we can target within our Google ads campaigns and things that we could also improve upon from our SEO strategy. So starting with a website the other thing sometimes is you may find with certain keywords so like let's just say you do colonoscopy near me. Am I did I spell that right? I did not. Colonoscopy near me. Okay. So let's say we do that and get results. You're going to find with certain keyword ideas, this isn't everything and usually it's things that are a little bit more sensitive. You there may be some limitations for like actually targeting that colonoscopy. And then when you search it, you might see additional keywords. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll take a page. So this is just a local a local medical practice by me. Start with a website, use that page, enter that website URL, and get results. And sometimes that will give you some additional keywords. Doesn't look like a huge difference here, but I had have I have had this before with certain medical practices and certain types of clients where you're looking for keywords and this will give you a little bit more keywords that you can target. Even things like you know screening schedule different keywords that you could potentially target within your campaigns. So that is that is one option there. But I would say for the most part when I am searching I do the website search really just to get a huge list of keywords. So if I take surfside.com and I use the entire website and I say okay let's find every single thing Google thinks that my website is relevant for that could be useful. So some of the keyword planner that could be useful just to say okay what does Google think are the most relevant keywords to my business. What are some keywords that do have a lot of average monthly searches that maybe I'm not targeting well enough that I can improve upon? So all of these are things that you know not only represent topics that I can target, things that I could potentially target on the Google ad side. The other thing is if you look at the website and you look at top of page bid ranges, you can generally get a decent idea of what some of the more valuable keywords are. If something shows that it gets 1,000 average monthly searches and the low bid is $125 and that's generally a very very valuable keyword. So this is one of those things where can I rank for search engine marketing services? probably a hard one to rank for, but these are just very valuable, very valuable keywords. Like even if I take Thailand.org, so it's a very big website. They have a ton of locations and practices and things like that. It's just kind of a massive massive practice around. We start with the website, use their entire website, and we just use what are the things that people are bidding the most on for keywords that are relevant to them. They actually don't have that many keywords here. I'm surprised, but basically, and these are all just branded, but like imaging center, Merles Inlet. Okay, so this decent average month or decent high bid. I'm actually very surprised they don't have a lot more keywords cuz they every possible thing you could possibly think of. But basically what you can find sometimes with websites that do have a lot of keywords that are showing up here is you can find some of the keywords that do have really high bid ranges and not even worrying about overall, you know, average monthly searches and volume, but just understanding what are the keywords that people are bidding the highest on. So let's come back over to the keyword planner. I don't know what this refresh our page. Get rid of our error messages. And let's come back over and get rid of our error messages. I need to redo my verification. If we come in here to discover new keywords, start with our keywords. And basically what we want to do is we want to say okay let's do for example if I want to find new keywords related to AI marketing strategies and AI marketing and AI advertising and ways that people are using artificial intelligence with their marketing strategy with their advertising strategy and how they're using it for different aspects. This is a good way to just find keywords based on these two seed keywords. So if we click on get results, two things I really like doing is one is if I just say, you know what, I want Surfside PBC to rank for AI advertising. Like I want to rank for that keyword. What I can actually do is enter these two keywords and just say I want to make sure my keyword text can AI advertising. So then I can find every single longtail, if I could type every single longtail keyword related to AI advertising. And now we can go by average monthly searches. We can go by top of page bid ranges high and low and basically come up with some type of idea of like okay maybe what we need to do is create a new business about AI marketing agencies but obviously I'm not going to do that but really it's these all can represent different things that people are searching AI programmatic advertising that is something people are searching so what I can do is say I want to rank for AI programmatic advertising I want to rank for AI advertising companies I can take those two keywords AI programmatic advertising and AI AI marketing company and say what does Google think are the most relevant keywords. Okay, so there's 78 total keyword ideas. I could go through these 78 keyword ideas right now and I can say based on what the most popular things are put me put together. We could do this with with Gemini or with Claude or with ChatGBT and basically say copy all of this say give me some ideas for topics I can write about topics I can create videos about a business idea that I can have and basically from just doing a couple searches I could start saying here is my pathway for how I can dominate these keywords so that when people are searching them Surfside PPC is the one that is showing up for them. So if I wanted to go after something new, this is where the keyword planner could be very useful. The other area where it's very useful is if you are somebody who is selling products. Let's just say, so we'll use leather boots for example. Let's say you're selling leather boots. What you can do is figure out, okay, leather boots. The amount of average monthly searches in the United States for this are that's waterproof boots. Leather boots is 40,500. The average bid, the low bid is 39. The high bid is $2.40. So, it's not a very high bid. You can get clicks for a dollar to $2. So, essentially, it's how do I target leather boots and create the best strategy possible with leather boots? Well, it's not targeting things like boots mail or waterproof boots for work. Because leather boots could mean a lot of things. So, as we kind of say, okay, let's add a filter keyword text contains leather boots. Now, we can find all of our longtail keywords, and this can help us figure out, okay, leather Chelsea boots. We can create an ad group for this. We can target this keyword and then we could actually send them to that page. Leather knee boots, we can create an ad group for this. We can create a keyword for this. We can create an ad for it and we can send them to that page. And basically what that's going to help you do is get the best quality score so that your clicks come in around this range rather than this range and you can make a whole lot more money per sale because you're spending a whole lot less per click. This is a great way to figure out I I think the biggest issue some people do with the keyword planner is you know I take something like Google ads for example and then you'll see a keyword in there like search engine marketing and basically for Google search engine marketing I don't know what I did oh keyword text basically with keyword uh with Google ads search engine marketing are two completely different things. So if I'm trying to rank for Google ads and I'm trying to rank for search engine marketing I have to treat them completely differently. Now, the way that I generally use the keyword planner, I would say the the the five main things that I do in it, maybe not even five, we'll just go through a few things. One is that keyword text. So, just using Google ads, adding keyword text. Basically, I'm trying to find longtail variations of Google ads. So, that's number one that I do a lot. Number two is going to be adding a filter and saying average monthly searches is greater than or equal to 30. and then what does my top of page bid range look like for those keywords just to try to figure out okay I want keywords and sometimes I'll even do higher so go up to like 250 and basically say okay what are the most valuable keywords does it make sense for me to create pages on my website for basically you know Google ads expert near me how do I rank for that keyword Google search ad and that's not an easy one to rank for because it's very location-based but like Google ads management services how do I rank for that keyword so that is one option the other thing is doing this average monthly searches is greater. You really don't need to do it for this. Looking at top of page bid ranges. These are generally going to be the keywords that drive the most conversions. So advertisers are bidding on these keywords. Google advertising company. I don't know why anybody's bidding $52 on Google Ads business manager, but that's that's another another thing for another day. But basically, Google Advertising agency, AdWords Consultant, Google Advertising Company. All of these are just very valuable keywords. I truthfully want to rank for the keyword Google Ads consulting. Like my goal is to get is to rank for Google Ads course, Google Ads consulting, Google Ads management services. Like I would like to rank for all that. Google Ads free training, free Google Ads training. Like I want to rank for those keywords. It's a lot of competition. So to rank for them, you really have to put together a really good strategy. But this is a good way to find all of the seed keywords that Google thinks are relevant to a specific keyword. using filters to come up with the right keyword text, looking at keywords by what what has the most bid ranges. I don't really use this competition over here. I don't think just doesn't really it's how competitive ad placement is for the keyword. It's just not something I use very often. One of the things that I'll do sometimes is if you do something like tree services, tree removal, tree trimming, and we get results and let's just say I'm working with a client in let's say they're in Oklahoma. Let's say they're or Nebraska. We'll say they're in Omaha, Nebraska. So sometimes I'll say, okay, we're we're targeting somebody in this area. Let's say for example, click on save. And basically what I do with this is if somebody is around this area saying, hey, I provide these services. Can you give me an estimated forecast? Well, we have an idea of what the average bid is for some of these keywords, $ 13 to $41. Actually, pretty expensive. 10 to 27. So really if you're looking at you know what's getting a lot of searches and what's valuable sometimes what I'll do for this is I'll say keyword text contains near me. So that's one. Now we have all of really their good keywords. So these are going to be the main keywords we want to target. If we take these keywords and we say okay these are all relevant and we'll take just 100. We add these to our saved keywords. We add these keywords to create a plan. First, we can have some level of idea of like, okay, our cost is probably going to be $10 to $15 per click. So, an easy way to figure out conversion or cost per conversion is saying a 10% conversion rate at $12 per click is going to give us $120 cost per conversion. A 20% conversion rate, you multiply the number by five. So, multiply 12 by five, we have a $60 cost per conversion. So take your cost per click, figure out a conversion rate, 10%, 20%, 5%, and come up with a cost per conversion that way. So that that's one of the easiest ways to do it. I I really like using that for, you know, trying to come up with that number. Next is going to be within the keyword planner. If we add these to our saved keywords, you'll see all of our saved keywords here. So you get a bunch of the saved keywords, average monthly searches, top of page bid range. Go to our forecast. We want to forecast all of our saved keywords. Dismiss this. Now over here, what I generally do is I increase the area. So I go Nebraska. Okay. So we have Nebraska there. This is saying, let's say we have a $150 daily budget. It doesn't Let's say we have a $100 daily budget. So this is saying we're going to get 11 conversions for $3,000. Not great. All keywords maximize conversions. So th this actually is not a great plan whatsoever, but it might just be because our conversion rate is so low. So let's say if conversion rate is 15%, we can get 31 conversions, about a $100 cost per conversion, slightly less. If we get a 20% conversion rate, so you can see just how expensive this could be. So 42 with a $100 daily budget, $200, they do not want us to. And that's for all the keywords that we added to our saved keywords. Targeting Nebraska. This is kind of how I do my my forecasting. It's not perfect, but you can see it is hard to actually get a lot of volume into an account even based on the Google Ads forecast tool. So, gives us some level of idea of keywords we need to target just by adding near me in there and then just understanding, okay, this is these are what the valuable keywords are for us. But this will be kind of our quick overview of the Google keyword planner. I will do a more extensive tutorial of this. I want to do a few Google keyword planner tutorials, just different ways to present it because it's one of those things I can sit in here for hours and just go over the Google keyword planner. Maybe we'll make it into one big long video. But this this will wrap up this tutorial. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section. 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