Google Keyword Planner Tutorial for 2023

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the serve side ppc youtube channel today is gonna be my google keyword planner tutorial for 2022 and this is going to be really geared towards beginners who haven't used the keyword planner yet and are looking for some more information for how to do keyword research for seo and how to do keyword research for google ads campaigns and really any ppc advertising campaign that they're running so the first part of this video is accessing the google keyword planner and the best way to do that is to start by creating a google ads account if you don't have one already once you have a google ads account and you're all set up and ready to start running campaigns what you can do is just go directly to this page right here and i'll put this link in the video description so you can easily find it so what you want to do is click on go to keyword planner and that's going to open up the keyword planner and give you a page that looks like this now if you've never used google ads before and if you've never used the keyword planner before you might run into an issue when you create a new account you're going to see screens that might look like this what's your main advertising goal if you do see the screen what you want to do is click on experienced with google ads now it might bring you into a new screen saying to create a new campaign and select the campaign type that you'd like to create so what you want to do is click on create an account without a campaign that's going to allow you to get into the google ads interface where you can access the keyword planner so let's get into the keyword planner and get started so now getting started with the keyword planner the first thing i want to go over is i have an old google ads account here that i use for tutorials in the past and i don't have an active campaign running so what might happen if you start using the google keyword planner for the first time let's just say you enter a keyword here you want to find more keywords related to keyword research so we're going to click on get results so what the keyword planner is going to do is bring us the most relevant keywords based on whatever keywords we enter at the very top here and you can see for average monthly searches they're giving us a range of data and at the very bottom here you're going to see to get more detailed statistics run a campaign so if you're looking for more information in terms of the exact number of average monthly searches and to get the full google keyword planner what you want to do is run a google ads campaign however i wouldn't worry too much about knowing the exact number of average monthly searches because having a range of data is not the end of the world basically this says there's 100 to 1 000 average monthly searches for souvl so what that means is there might be 500 average monthly searches for example so it doesn't really matter that much that you have the exact number here you can still target these keywords when you're creating content or for your google ads campaigns so what i want to do next is show you the features of the google keyword planner and i'm going to come over to my other account where i actually have the search volume data and everything like that so we can look at the full version of the keyword planner now when you get in your google ads account if you go to tools and settings and then under planning in the menu you can click on keyword planner to find this otherwise just go to this page here click on go to keyword planner and it will open up this screen so i want to start the first thing i want to go over is how to use keywords to expand your keyword list so you can see here it says start with keywords so what you want to do is enter products or services closely related to your business now you might have to do this multiple times if your business has a bunch of different products for sale for example if i come to my website farmhouse goals i would do different searches for bedding for curtains for decor for furniture for lighting because you don't want to try to find all of these keywords at once what you can do is for example for farmhouse betting i can come in here and say just enter some different related keywords that i know are related to bedding so quilts comforters so all these different types of keywords is a great way to get started and to expand my keyword list specifically for farmhouse betting so i'm going to get rid of these for now so let's just say i want to expand my keyword list for farmhouse furniture so there's a couple different ways you could search here you can start with keywords which i'm going to show you or you could start with a website using either the entire website or a specific page so starting with keywords let's just say enter farmhouse furniture and we'll enter some related keywords here so tables okay so i've entered nine keywords here all related to furniture and some of the more popular types of furniture that people are looking for for the house so you can enter a domain to use as a filter so it will filter out services products or brands that you don't offer i generally don't do this so i'm not going to do this now and you can see here their tip is try not to be too specific or general so meal delivery is better than meals for a food delivery business so essentially you want to be entering keywords here that you think potential customers are going to search and google to find a business like yours so using these keywords we can click on get results and this is the first way to look for keywords and to find a huge list of keywords now i'm going to go through every part of the keyword planner coming up i just want to show you some different ways to actually get to this screen where you have a ton of keywords so entering these keywords here gave me over 6 000 keyword ideas which really is just too many so i'll show you how to filter out some of these different keywords but if we scroll down it's going to give me the keywords by relevance so the most relevant keywords based on what i entered and just going through here you can see i already have a ton of keywords i can start to target with my content and with some of the products i'm selling on my website so this is really helpful as you're trying to find different ways to target people based on what they're searching related to your business so we're going to come back over here and the other way you can find keywords is to start with a website so starting with the website allows you to enter your entire website or a specific page on your website and what the google keyword planner is going to do is return a huge list of keyword ideas again and it's all going to be keywords that they find the most relevant to our website okay so i've used the entire site farmhousegoals.com and we're going to click on get results and then i'm going to go back to the keyword option and i'm going to go through every part of the keyword planner so we'll click on get results now okay so using our website now i don't use the website option that often but what you can see is it's giving me the most relevant keywords on my website so these are all different keywords that i know i have specific pages for i have a page on my website for farmhouse tv stands for sale i have page on my website for modern farmhouse coffee tables for farmhouse coffee table sets but the other thing you're going to find here are different keywords that are really just generic keywords that are not really completely related to my website i don't target just the keyword bar stools i target the keyword farmhouse barstools so if you enter your website and you do average monthly searches it's going to give you a ton of keywords here that are going to be extremely popular so a ton of average monthly searches but very very difficult to rank for so that's why i generally don't use my website i prefer to just enter keywords and then go through the different keyword ideas they give me so let's go back to the keyword ideas and for this i'm just going to enter a few different furniture keywords so we'll do farmhouse furniture okay so we just have four keywords here and we're going to click on get results again and now we're looking at the mo the keywords that they gave us by relevance so if we scroll down again these are all very relevant keywords based on the ones that i entered now the next thing i want to go over is average monthly searches here the three month change year over year change competition and then the top of page bid and the top of page bid high range so they give you the low range and the high range the other thing you'll see over here is account status so if you're already bidding on a keyword it's going to show in account here so i'm bidding on some of these keywords in my campaign so you can see it's showing that it's in my account so we'll scroll back over and i'll start with average monthly searches so if we scroll to the top you can see they give you the average monthly searches here so for some companies and businesses there's a ton of seasonality this there isn't a ton here so it kind of dips a little bit in the summer pretty popular showing in january 2021 and it's giving us the data from the previous 12 months so it's actually december 2021 so what we can do is say all available and it's going to give us from january 2018 to december 2021 so you can see it's grown pretty well almost doubled basically from 2018 until about 2020 2021 so there's a ton more searches now so it's always good to see growth in terms of search volume what i'm going to do is i'm going to scroll down and just look at average monthly searches for all these keywords here and if you scroll over it'll show you the average monthly search volume for each individual keyword and how it kind of goes throughout the year so obviously if you're looking at things that with christmas and different things like that it's gonna show you a spike around november and december so something like christmas trees which it showed earlier obviously has a huge spike in the beginning of december so this can be really useful if you're looking to target a specific keyword and you want to look for when the most searches happen so if you're trying to optimize for different times of the year i could say okay usually in may or in june or july this keyword tends to peak so i want to make sure three four months beforehand i'm already optimized for this keyword so i can take advantage of that search traffic so that's one thing to keep in mind as you're looking for average monthly searches the other thing i like to look at so competition basically every single keyword on this list is high competition and that means there's a lot of advertisers bidding on these keywords so competition is looking at the total number of advertisers that are bidding on each keyword and it says relative to all keywords across google so sometimes you'll see competition as medium or low so that means there just aren't as many advertisers bidding on those keywords and to look at a little bit more about bids there's top of page bid the low range and top of page bid the high range so this gives you an idea of how much advertisers are bidding on these different keywords it could be very useful as you're setting your own bids for google ads or trying to kind of understand how much you think you're going to end up paying per click if you are targeting these keywords so that's search volume and bids now the one thing i just want to go over very quickly is you're going to see here keyword view so the other thing i like to look at sometimes is grouped view and this almost separates your keywords into google ads ad groups so it's going to group together similar keywords but what i do like about this is even at the very top you could see bookshelf so this is a good keyword that i can target and if we click on this drop down arrow you can see it pulls down some different long tail keywords related to farmhouse bookshelves so if you are creating a page about the best farmhouse bookshelves i can make sure i have a list of modern farmhouse bookshelves of white farmhouse bookshelves so just some of the different things that people are looking up pretty frequently and it's going to help me create my content and kind of optimize it towards what people are searching for the most so that's grouped view so let's come back over to keyword view now we can keep going through this they give you a ton of different groups but if we come back over here to keyword view when you do a search and in the keyword planner and you get your results you're usually going to have refined keywords so if we refine keywords what you can do is exclude brand or non-brand keywords you can exclude if since i'm looking up furniture here i can say you know what i don't want anything related to tv stands i don't want anything related to stools i've already have those keywords covered so i can remove them all together so it helps you get rid of some different keywords it also helps you see some of the different keywords they pulled out so farmhouse wardrobe for example is a keyword i haven't targeted yet so that's something i know i can target so refined keywords is good for not only excluding keywords but also seeing where you might have gaps in what you're targeting with your content now what i generally do here is for brand or non-brand keywords i don't target most brand keywords for farmhouse goals some types of products i will which i'll show you in a second but for stores i'm not targeting pottery barn farmhouse furniture so i'm going to get rid of all these stores all together if we keep scrolling down they have other brands so if i do carry some of these different brands i might not want to get rid of them for example if i have walker edison products there's no reason for me to exclude that keyword but what you can do is exclude the other brands here and it helps just to refine the keywords and we went from 4 300 keywords to 3 800 keywords so it's a great way to remove keywords that you weren't going to target altogether now if we keep scrolling down you can see they have room here so they're going to come up with a bunch of things that you can refine based on what you type in so it's going to be different for every single search and the different products or services you're looking up they're going to give you different ways to refine your keywords but you can see down here there's different things that i can get rid of altogether if i know i'm not going to be targeting them and that's where refined keywords really comes into play you can reset it you can expand all of these so you can go through each individual one for right now i'm just going to click on the x that's refined keywords you can see i have 77 concepts excluded helps you get rid of keywords again you're just not targeting okay so the next thing we're going to go over is some different ways to refine your targeting and use filters so if we go to the top here you can see it's set for united states as where i'm targeting if you're not targeting the entire united states you can get rid of this and enter the location here that you're targeting for example let's just say you serve the state of texas you can choose that as a state let's say you're just in los angeles county you can go to los angeles and you can target the nielsen dma region you could actually target los angeles county so you can choose exactly where you're targeting and then what that's going to give you is the average monthly searches for that specific area rather than the entire united states for a local service company for example let's just say you're a plumbing company you target the entirety of los angeles county and then you're only going to see the keywords that are relevant for that area and the average monthly search volume for those keywords so you're not going to see how many people are searching it in boston or how many people are searching in minnesota or anywhere around the country you're just going to see that specific region so i usually just keep my location as united states so we'll keep it as that for right now but i just wanted to show that to you so we'll click on cancel next for language targeting so you can actually choose different languages here and what you want to do is target the languages that your customers speak so i usually just keep this as english so that's another option that you have now you're going to see google and google and search partners i usually just leave this as google i just think the end search partners isn't giving you exact data and i prefer to just focus on google when it comes to search volume i'm usually just looking at the last 12 months that's usually automatically what it's going to give you but you can look further back just to see maybe search volumes increasing maybe it's decreasing and you can see trends throughout the year again for seasonality for different types of keywords people looking for different things throughout the year so that's some different options you have when it comes to targeting now the other thing you can do is they usually give you broad in your search here and they're going to give you some different options for keywords that you can target so i could say let me target farmhouse dining room furniture farmhouse furnishings i can add these to broaden my search i'm just going to keep my search as is but it's an option that you do have we've already went over refined keywords so we're going to scroll down here and go over filters so filters can be used for a variety of reasons you can do keyword text must contain a certain keyword you can do it does not contain a certain keyword and if you want to enter multiple keywords i can say i want to make sure my keyword text contains farmhouse or rustic so we're going to click on apply and i don't think that removed all that many keywords from our list but just an option that you have for either keyword text must contain something or let's say it does not contain things like cheap affordable i could do budget friendly you can enter free here for furniture i could do something like near me and click on apply and now any keyword here that was near me is going to get removed so sometimes it's a good way to get rid of some different keywords that you know you do not want to target okay next if we come into filters again so average monthly searches i'm going to go through that in a second competition if you're looking for specific competition low medium high you can choose that so i usually don't do competition here that often so if we come and do more filters add impression share so that's something here that you can that you can optimize by and that's going to actually take the data from your google ads account so you can see for the most part i don't have a high enough impression share for any of these keywords because i have a very limited budget for the campaign i'm running this one is showing that i have less than one percent ad impression share and the rest if you get a dash here just means you don't have enough data so i don't really have much here that i can use to refine my keyword list so i'm not really going to worry about that top of page bid low range you can choose whether or not you want the top of page bid to be a certain amount on the low range or the high range again not something i'm going to do at this point if you're building a seo keyword list you don't really need to worry about any of these down here now one thing you might want to do is average monthly searches so some different options here you can say average monthly searches is greater than or equal to let's just say 100. so there's going to be a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the list here that have barely any average monthly searches and if we just look at them real quick so we'll look by low to high you're going to see some of these down here have zero searches and some of them are just going to be things i'm not really going to target specifically with my website so what i might want to do is let's just use average monthly searches and say it must be at least 100 average monthly searches for us to target it okay so you can see here now it's showing 1100 keyword ideas so that got rid of a ton of keyword ideas that are probably at the very bottom of the list what we could always do down the line is go back and look at some of those keywords that might be less than 100 the other thing you can do is add a filter and say average monthly searches must be between 100 and 1000 for example and what that's going to do is give you a ton of keywords that might not have a ton of average monthly searches but they're going to be a little bit less competitive and they're going to be easier to rank for than something like farmhouse dining table where there are a ton of advertisers bidding on this keyword and there are a ton of huge websites that have farmhouse dining tables for sale so it's very difficult to rank for a keyword like this with 33 000 average monthly searches that is a very valuable keyword so sometimes you can look through ranges of data using the average monthly searches here and it gives you a ton of opportunities so some of the best keywords on my website are keywords with less than a thousand less than 500 average monthly searches because they're easier to rank for and easier to get on that first page of google for so we're going to get rid of click on the x here for now and what we have is 1100 almost 1200 keyword ideas related to farmhouse furniture so what you can do now is download this list either as a csv file or what we can do is download it using google sheets so if we click on that you're going to see a file name and then it's going to save to a specific folder so i'm not going to be doing the google sheets right now but you can see how easy it is to download to google sheets if you do use google sheets so what we can do is we'll download the csv file and just open it just to show you what it looks like okay so this is what the file looks like and they're going to give you all the different keywords that we have here the average monthly searches we have the three month change the year over year change so some of the different trends the bidding the competition level in a form of a number then they actually give you searches by month so this is january 2021 this is february 2021 so they're actually giving us how many searches for these individual keywords for each month so if we scroll down you're going to see there's a ton of keywords here so usually what i do when i'm creating an seo keyword list is i go through this list and i pull out every keyword that i find unique so something for example like a farmhouse filing cabinet so as i'm coming up with different keywords related to farmhouse cabinets farmhouse filing cabinet is something i can target specifically with a page that's just listing the top rated farmhouse themed filing cabinets for sale and it could be something that i used on my page for farmhouse office furniture so that's kind of the way that i look at it farmhouse trunk coffee table that's something that i can optimize for on my farmhouse coffee tables page and maybe i try to put together a list of different products for sale through the shop of my website of farmhouse trunk style coffee tables now something like farmhouse style cabinets that's not a keyword i would really optimize for altogether it's just i view that as the same exact keyword as farmhouse cabinets however as i am optimizing for something like farmhouse beds farmhouse bed frames i can say farmhouse twin bed frames that's something with 590 average monthly searches so that's something that's worth optimizing for so as you scroll down here and you start looking for more and more keywords you're really trying to find keywords that even if it's something like 390 searches a farmhouse linen cabinet a farmhouse display cabinet these are different things you can try to optimize your website for by creating pages where i'm listing products for those types of keywords for sale so it's going to give you a ton of different ideas now something over here like rustic farmhouse entryway bench i would just target the keyword farmhouse entryway bench so some different ways to look at keywords is you don't need to say i need to optimize for every single keyword that's here what you really want to say is okay farmhouse bar table that's a good keyword to optimize for farmhouse chest that's a good keyword to optimize for by itself liquor cabinet that's one to optimize for by itself so these are different pages i can create on my website whereas something like white farmhouse cabinet i might just want to put that specifically on the cabinets page so some different ways to look at keywords is to kind of understand which ones you can pull out as their own topic and other ones are really just going to be viewed as a sub-topic within basically a larger category so it can be difficult as you are doing seo keyword research to understand the keyword intent behind each individual keyword what people are actually looking for what you can actually optimize for and rank on google with so that's something you're trying to always improve as you go but if you do come up with a keyword list like this one with over a thousand keywords as you keep coming down you're just gonna have a ton of keywords here that you're really not gonna ever ever really optimize for because it's just not worth it ultimately so this is how to kind of do seo keyword research using the google keyword planner the other thing that you can do is if you are trying to expand keywords for an existing page so let's just say for example i have a page about farmhouse coffee tables and i'm trying to find every relevant keyword to farmhouse coffee tables what you could do is search that keyword and click on get results and what we can do is look at the most relevant keywords based on what we entered and you can see here so white farmhouse coffee table square farmhouse coffee tables lift top coffee tables so making sure i have all of these variations on my page where i am trying to sell farmhouse coffee tables and then some of these for example round farmhouse coffee table that's something i can create a separate product category for now you can also to take it one step further is let's get rid of this go to a website you can use a specific page so i can enter the farmhouse coffee tables page on my website and then it will just pull keywords from that page and try to find the most relevant keywords and i need to make sure that i'm optimized for those keywords as best as possible okay so the next and last thing that i'm going to go over is how to create a google ads campaign through the google keyword planner so you can actually build a keyword plan and publish it to google ads and i did just create a full video about this topic on my channel i will link that video in the description so if you're interested in building a google ads campaign using the google keyword planner from start to finish but what i want to show you is a few different ways that you can build a keyword plan and forecast some data so if we click on broaden your search we'll just add some of these different keywords here so farmhouse table farmhouse chairs and we'll just do farmhouse furniture so kind of the same ones that we looked up before and we click on get results again so if we scroll down here so what we can do is select individual keywords and you can see here we have the keyword selected we can either add it to a to our plan or to an existing campaign so if we click on existing campaign i can take the campaign that i'm running right now and add this keyword to it create a separate ad group and it will allow me to start targeting more and more keywords within my campaign now if we don't have a campaign yet to add it to what we want to do is add it to our plan we want to create a new ad group so let's just say our ad group matches the keyword that we are targeting the way i look at ad groups as i'm building a google ads campaign is they should all have a landing page that is really relevant to the keywords in the ad group and i can create advertisements that actually match what people are searching for so when i'm creating a new ad group for farmhouse coffee tables i want to add this keyword in here we're going to click on create to create this new ad group and then you want to select your keyword match type i generally go with phrase match keywords i think it gives you the best of broad and exact where you have plenty of search volume and the searches are going to be relevant to the keywords that i enter so we're going to click on add keyword here and now what that's going to do is start building our keyword plan so if we click on keyword plan here you can see we have one saved keyword and it's going to show the average monthly search volume for that keyword so if we come back over to keyword ideas we can continue to build our plan we'll just add a couple more here so we're going to add farmhouse table to a plan we would create an ad group do farmhouse tables click on create phrase match keyword and we'll add that keyword farmhouse chairs so same thing i would create new ad groups for all of these i don't want people who are looking specifically for farmhouse chairs to land on a page with farmhouse tables or farmhouse coffee tables so what you can try to do is create ad groups and really keep it as organized as possible something like chairs and tables because they have so many variations what you might want to do is we'll do farmhouse chairs our new ad group is do an exact match keyword because that's going to keep the keyword relevancy as high as possible for those ad groups that are really much more broad whereas something like if we come down here a little bit farmhouse desk i would target the phrase match keyword for farmhouse desk so for example farmhouse table and chairs so for targeting the phrase match for that keyword it could go into either one of these ad groups so that's where you might want to use exact match as you're creating your plan so we'll just enter exact match here just to keep going with the example but what we can do is if you do have a whole campaign built here and let's just say you created a huge plan you have hundreds of keywords what you can do is forecast that data so if you come over to forecast it's going to show our draft plan you can see bid strategy to maximize clicks or you can choose manual cpc i would recommend just doing maximize clicks here and then you can update your location targeting your language targeting i usually just keep this as google and what it's showing me since i'm recording this in january 2022 it's showing me the forecast data for the following month so it's giving me february 1st to the 28th 2022 the forecast data so i'm obviously only targeting three keywords here you would want to target much more than that but if i come in here and let's just say my conversion rate is five percent my value per conversion is 25 dollars so we'll click on save so it's showing that with a 15 average daily budget i would get 44 conversions for 420 dollars so my cost for the campaign would be 420 i would drive 880 clicks my click-through rate would be 3.9 percent and it's actually showing my conversion value at one point one thousand dollars with a return on ad spend of 2.6 or 260 percent so my average cpa would be nine dollars and 51 cents and then my value per conversion here was 25 dollars obviously these are pretty generous numbers five percent conversion rate 25 dollar value per conversion so if your conversion rate is 2 if your value per conversion is 15 then you might not see the same exact overall value from a campaign 420 in cost 270 in conversion value so if you know your value per conversion on average maybe using google analytics data maybe using the data you have from shopify or whatever you're selling whatever it is if you know your conversion rate and your value per conversion you can enter that here and it just gives you more data so you can understand what to expect from your campaign now if we adjust our bid strategy at the top here to manual cpc one thing you might see is if we do set a max cost per click you can see it's going to show what you can get from this campaign if you adjust your max cost per click up or down so you're eventually going to reach these points where there's no reason to keep increasing your max cost per click because it's only going to hurt your overall conversion rate but as you come down you might be able to say okay if i set my max cpc at 94 cents so click down here we have a dollar 62 for example my cost is gonna be three point four thousand my conversion value still really not good enough to run this campaign but you can kind of have an understanding using this forecast data of how much you're going to get for your campaign now what we can do next is click on create campaign just name it choose an average daily budget so they're recommending a very high budget here i could say i want a 10 daily budget click on save and it will launch the campaign all we need to do is create our advertisements and our campaign will start running now last but not least i'm going to click on cancel one more time if we come over to tools and settings planning we click on the keyword planner if you're working on a plan so for example this is the one we were just working on this is one i implemented previously so it was last modified a couple days ago it will save your plan for years so if you are working on a plan you can continue to work on it and work on it and work on it over time and then launch your campaign when you're ready so the keyword planner is a great way to build google ads campaigns now the other thing you could do is get search volume and forecast i prefer to just to create a plan and go to the forecast like i showed you but ultimately to use the keyword planner click on discover new keywords start with keywords here if let's just say for example advanced auto parts reached out to me and said we want to promote everything on our website i would basically go one category at a time so if we look at breaks here you can see i would enter the keyword breaks i would do break pads break shoes break rotors break calipers i would enter all of these different keywords here to find as many keywords as possible related to breaks and then you would keep doing this for all of these different categories obviously keyword research can take a very long time but it is vital to come up with these keyword lists for example like this one that we built here to really understand the types of keywords that people are typing in and what you want to do is go through your keyword list pull out the topics that you know you can target with your website and the targets you want to rank for and the more and more that you do that the better and better you create content and create pages whether it's products on the pages whether it is just general information the higher you will rank over time so that is my google keyword planner tutorial come to google ads get started with using it if you're creating campaigns if you're doing search engine optimization research it's a very great free keyword research tool even if you don't get all the data for average monthly searches you still get a ton of ideas so thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel