If you don’t know it by now, you should: keywords are the most important element in your SEO strategy and will make or break your paid search ads. Keywords are like pizza dough to pizza. You’re not really eating pizza if there’s no crust. If you don’t have the right keywords, you don’t have a good SEO strategy or a PPC ad campaign that will give you a good return on your investment (ROI). 

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines like Google and Bing. Sometimes people type in words, like “recipe homemade pizza” and sometimes they use sentences like “what’s the best pizza near me?” 

In both scenarios, the keyword is “pizza. ”  “Recipe” and “near me” are other secondary keywords.

If you want people to find your webpage when they type something into a search engine, you need to use a lot of the keywords related to your goods or services. And you need to think like hey do – how would they use those keywords in a search box.  Once you figure that out, you need to use those primary and secondary keywords in the headline, in the image alt tags, and in bolded subheads, like the phrase after this sentence.

 

How to Figure Out Valuable Keywords

The Google Keyword Planner is a tool that helps you research keywords in your field. It is free to use, meaning the value of Google Keyword Planner is immense. 

But you don’t have to use it. You can just think like your customers might. What words and phrases would you type into Google or Bing to get the goods and services you offer?

Ask your friends, family and even strangers what words and phrases they’d use.

Beside the invaluable Google Keyword Planner, there are other tools to find keywords. 

Übersuggest and WordStream have helpful keyword tools to find new search terms. Paid options include SEMrush. 

Google Trends will also show you what words are trending, and you might incorporate those terms into your keywords. Keep in mind that if something is trending on Google, however, it will be hard to compete with big players, i.e. companies or news outlets with multiple pages, to rank high in search engine results pages (SERP).

Once you have your keywords,  start creating content using those keywords in the title, headers, and in the body of an article or blog post.

When you do this enough, you’ll notice that your webpage is ranking higher in SERP.  You won’t notice changes immediately. It will take between three and six months. 

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how to use Google Keyword Planner to increase your web traffic organically, and through paid ads.

 

How to Get the Most Value Out of Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner helps you research keywords to display web pages higher in SERP organically, i.e. for free, or for pay per click ads, which appear under the word “Sponsored” in Google at the very top of SERP.

You can use Google Keyword planner – which is again a free tool – to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of how many people perform searches using those keywords every month. You can also see an estimate of what it will cost you, on average, to run a PPC ad with those words. Let’s look more closely at the benefits of Google’s Keyword Planner. 

Discover New Keywords: 

If you are a Volvo car salesperson, you may think that your customers always include the word Volvo in their searches. But Google’s Keyword Planner will give you other ideas, like “used Volvo near me” or competitors of Volvos.

You can use this option in two ways:

• Start with keywords: Enter up to 10 keywords related to your business. 

Use this method if you have a keyword (or phrase) in mind and want a list of related ideas. 

Say you want to find keywords related to “garden supplies near me.” Enter that keyword into the search bar. Then click “Get results.”

Tip: You can enter your site’s URL to help Google remove services, products, or brands you don’t offer. So if you don’t offer gardening gloves, and enter your site’s URL into this field, Google won’t include keywords related to gardening gloves. 

 

• Start with a website.

You can also find keyword ideas by entering the URL of a website or specific page on a website – either your own site or a site with a page you’d like to emulate. Google will look for keywords related to that page’s (or site’s) content.

 

See how Many People Search For Those Keyword Each Month:

The Google Keyword Planner shows you the number of searches a keyword gets each month.

When we did the search above using the “start with keywords” option, we got 282 results for related keywords, some of which are searched for 1,000 times per month and some that get searches up to 100,000 times. 

We tried the second option by entering the URL of a local garden nursery near us.

We got 1803 keyword ideas. Some costs for ads on these related keywords only cost 3 cents. 

 

Determine Cost and Budget if You Want to Run Ads: 

When you have the number of searches performed each month, you can also see the average cost to run an ad with each keyword. Lower search volumes mean people pay less for ads. That’s good for those with limited budgets. 

 

Compile a List

You can now edit your list of keyword ideas using filters and categories. With this list, you can come up with ideas for content, monitor changes in ad rates, and more. 

You want to use filters to remove or target keywords  based on criteria like user intent, brand, competition, impression share, and keyword text. For example, you may want to see keyword ideas where bids under $1 may be enough to reach the top of the page. Use that filter.

You may want to remove keywords about brands or goods that you don’t offer. 

To do this, look for the “Refine keywords” side panel on the “Keyword ideas” page.

Open the categories, and uncheck  any boxes to remove these keywords from your list.

You can also add filters by clicking add filters. 

 

Create New Campaigns

Finally,  after you’ve made a list of keywords, you have two options.

One is to add them to your “Saved keywords” to organize them later and see forecasts of their performance.

The other is to add them to ad groups within existing paid search campaigns.

If you don’t know what to do with this information, reach out to us. We can talk to you about how to create content around keywords or how to start PPC ad campaigns. We can train you or handle these services for you. 

Whether you work with us or handle this on your own, there’s immense value in Google Keyword Planner. Play around with it. Learn about the role keywords play in organic traffic and paid ads. 

In either case, you want to structure content around those keywords, using them in page titles, headlines, the body of the text, and subheads on a page. You want to include them on alt tags in pictures too.

Confused? It is kind of confusing and big tech intends to keep it that way. That proprietary information keeps them on the top of the kingdom.

We offer SEO keyword research and SEO focused content creation to businesses. Our team of web developers, researchers and writers are the best in the business. 

Many of our clients have us create websites, rewrite web pages on existing sites, or supply new content in the form of blog posts (new content earns you extra points in SERP) with the right keywords in mind. 

We can also write new product or services pages, or rewrite existing ones to better match the phrases and queries people are actually making.

If and when you want to test out Google ads, we excel at keyword research, bidding prices and ad content creation.

When every part of your digital marketing strategy, which includes SEO keywords, gets a tune up, the various parts of your business start to work together in harmony. You should notice an increase in web traffic, increased queries and ideally, increased sales. 

It doesn’t happen overnight, but with the right team of marketers by your side, it will and can happen.

Let’s start with a free SEO analysis of any page on your website. Reach out, we’ll examine it, and then we’ll talk about what can be improved and how we might help you.