How do I use Keyword Planner? It’s a question I’m often asked. My first answer is to go to the source itself, Google. But not everyone wants to read through load of technical details. So we’ve created this easy to understand article instead.
The first thing you’ll need to do, is sign up to an account with Google. Unfortunately there is no other way to use Keyword Planner without one. It will take you through the process of asking for your credit card details and set up an ad for your website. Don’t worry about being charged or having an unwanted ad running. As soon as you’ve completed the process, you can cancel the ad.
Now to find the Keyword Planner tool, look for the icon of a spanner. Click on it and then choose Keyword Planner. You’ll be sent to a page that looks like this:
To make things easy and get you finding keywords quickly, just concentrate on the first option: Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category. When you click on that option, you’ll get this:
Once again, just use the first box under ‘Your product or service.’ Into this box, type the words you think people would use to find your specific product or service. For instance, if you sold book bags, type in words or phrases such as book bags, reading bags or library bags. You can enter the URL of the page you are going to use the keywords you find on, but you don’t have to. This is here to help Google come up with some automatic answers if you were running any ads through AdWords. For the final empty box, you can click on the drop down arrow and choose a category. But you don’t have to do this.
Next come some options to help you refine your keyword results. Your choices will depend on where your target audience is. So if you were in New Zealand, you’d have your targeting looking like the image above. Once again to make things easier, I wouldn’t worry about choosing negative keywords, keyword filters, keyword options or keywords to include. But I would make sure the date range gives you around 12 months of results.
Next you press Get Ideas and this fabulous keyword tool will list a range of keywords for you to choose from, like this:
Now comes the time you need to analyse the results. You’ll see that I searched with the words book bags. As I don’t currently have any AdWords ads running, it only gave me general results. This is fine for what we need. Now, the only columns we need to look at are the Keyword and the Average Monthly Searches ones. The others are used when you set up a paid ad only. First, scroll down the page and write down the keywords which you personally think are suitable and their number of monthly searches. Keep looking through the remaining pages too. This will give you a good list of keywords to pick from.
Next you need to start thinking strategically. Keywords with a higher number of monthly searches are probably being used by your competitors already. This means it may be better for you to focus on the keywords with low searches. However, this is not always the case. You can enter some of the keywords into Google Incognito and see which websites pop up. This can help you check that you are using the right keywords.
What we have described above are the basic answers to the question, how do I use Keyword Planner. Following these steps will get you quickly started with some keywords for your website. If you’d a more thorough keyword analysis done, we can help. As keyword finders, we know our stuff and can give you the words you need to get found by Google. For more information or to book your spot, just fill in our contact form below.
Posted: Monday 20 November 2017