Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide
With all the talk in the SEO world today about content, authorship and social signals it’s easy to forget a little thing that happens to be the foundation of SEO: keyword research.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that without keywords, there’s no such thing as SEO.
Keywords are like a compass for your SEO campaigns: they tell you where to go and whether or not you’re making progress.
They also help you figure out the thoughts, fears, and desires of your target market (as your Analytics stats will tell you, people type their inner-most thoughts into Google’s little search bar).
In fact, keyword research is just market research for the 21st century.
To Benefit from Keywords, You Need to Know How to Find (and Use) Them
If you can master the lost art of finding awesome keywords for your business — you’ll not only benefit from more search engine traffic – but you’ll also know your customers better than your competition.
Despite the importance of keyword selection, most people’s keyword research process looks something like this:
1 Come up with a few keywords that potential customers might search for
2 Plug those keywords into the Google Keyword Planner
3 Pick a keyword based on a vague combination of search volume and buyer intent
Well today, all that changes.
Because now you have a comprehensive guide that’s going to show you exactly how to find words and phrases that your target market uses to find information on the web.
And when you tailor your on-page SEO around the right keywords, you’ll watch your site rocket to the top of Google — landing you more leads, sales and commissions in the process.
But there’s a catch:
Before you fire up a keyword research tool or fiddle with a single title tag, you need to identify niche markets in your industry.
Once you find these niche markets, you’ll be able to tap into untapped buyer keywords that your competition doesn’t know about.
Niche Markets: Where (Smart) Keyword Research Starts
As I mentioned earlier, most people begin the process with a keyword research tool, like the Google Keyword Planner (GKP).
This is a HUGE mistake.
Why? Because as great as the GKP is at spitting out closely related keywords, it’s horrible at coming up with new keyword ideas.
Here’s an example:
What do you think of when you hear the word “basketball”?
Whether or not you’re a diehard fan, here are some words that may have popped into your head:
But when you enter the word “basketball” into the GKP “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” box…
…none of those related words show up.
In other words, the GKP only shows you keywords that are VERY intimately tied to the keyword you gave it.
Keywords that are closely – but not directly – related are rarely shown to you. And these are often the most profitable keywords in your market.
No wonder so many keywords are next to impossible to rank for: everyone and their mom are targeting the exact same keywords!
That’s not to say you shouldn’t target any keywords that the GKP gives you (in fact, there’s an entire chapter in this guide dedicated to using the tool).
But don’t rely on the GKP (or any other tool out there) to show you the full breadth of what’s out there.
To do that, you need to identify niche markets.
Niche Clouds: The Easiest Way to Find Niche Markets
You may be wondering:
“What is a Niche Market, exactly?”
A Niche Market is simply a sub-segment that’s part of a larger market.
For example, let’s say that you run a business that sells basketball hoops.
As we saw earlier, the GKP is essentially useless at giving you anything but very, very closely related keywords:
While some of these keywords might be a great fit for your business, there are dozens of others that are less competitive and are just as valuable to your site.
In my experience the easiest way to find these untapped keywords is to map out your industry’s Niche Clouds.
Niche Clouds are simple mind maps that identify niches that are closely related to your bread and butter niche.
For example, someone interested in buying a basketball hoop may also search for:
How to shoot a better free throw
Slam dunk highlights
How to get recruited by college scouts
Nutrition for athletes
How to improve a vertical jump
Each of those searches are part of a unique – but closely related – Niche Market.
For example, the keyword “How to shoot a better free throw” is part of the Niche Market “free throw shooting”.
Niche Markets are usually small-ish niches that aren’t large enough to support their own website or product.
In fact — while some Niche Markets will hook you up with 10 or more keywords – most will have only 2-5 keywords with enough search volume and commercial intent for you to actually optimize pages around.
But when you add them together you’ll often find that you have more low-competition keywords than you know what do with.
As I mentioned earlier, Niche Clouds makes finding all of the Niche Markets in your industry super-easy.
Here’s how to do it:
Creating Your First Niche Cloud Map
The goal with your Niche Cloud Map is to map out the different “clouds” that tend to float around your actual industry. Each cloud represents a Niche Market.
All you need to start is mind mapping software or (if you want to go old school) a pen and paper.
Here’s what our basketball hoop example would look as a Niche Cloud map:
You should be able to come up with at least 5 different Niche Markets off of the top of your head…which is enough to find some great keywords.
If you’re struggling – or want to find more Niche Markets – here are a few simple strategies you can tap into.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a super-simple way to identify other Niche Markets that potential customers belong to.
And once you identify these Niche Markets, you can easily find keywords that potential customers use when they’re not searching for your products and services (in other words, most of the time).
Your keyword research-focused buyer persona should include your target audience’s:
Gender
Age
Approximate income
Hobbies and interests (what they do for fun)
Things that they struggle with
What they want to accomplish (personally and professionally)
Depending on your niche you may have several different buyer personas.
For example, following our basketball hoop example, you might have buyer personas for basketball players AND for parents (who in many cases will be the ones that ultimately buy the product).
In my experience the easiest way to make a buyer persona is to create a PowerPoint slide:
This slide helps you get into the head of your target customer, which will help you think of with Niche Markets that you may have overlooked the first time you sat down with your Niche Cloud Map.
Forums
Forums are like having live focus groups at your fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The easiest way to find forums where your target audience hangs out is to use these search strings in Google:
“keyword” + “forums”
“keyword” + “forum
“keyword” + “board”
You can also use BoardReader.com, which is a search engine for forums.
In about 10 seconds I’ve identified 3 potential Niche Markets from a single basketball forum:
Basketball socks
Basketball confidence
Basketball accessories
One you’ve found a few Niche Markets that make sense for your site, add them to your Niche Cloud Map.
Wikipedia Table of Contents
Wikipedia is an often-overlooked goldmine of niche research.
Where else can you find overviews on a topic curated by thousands of industry experts and organized into neat little categories?
Here’s how to use Wikipedia to find Niche Markets.
1
First, head over to Wikipedia and type in a broad keyword:
That will take you to the Wikipedia entry for that broad topic.
2
Then, look for the “contents” section of the page:
In this case we found three more Niche Markets:
Types of rebounds (offensive, defensive)
Boxing out
Notable NBA rebounders
Easy, right?
The Head, Body and Tail
Now that you’ve identified a large group of Niche Markets it’s time to find some keywords!
Most people in SEO (myself included) divide keywords into three main categories: head, body and the (long) tail.
Head Keywords:
These are usually single-word keywords with insane amounts of search volume and competition (for example, “insurance” or “vitamins”). Because searcher intent is all over the place (someone searching for “insurance” might be looking for a car insurance quote, a list of life insurance companies or a definition of the word), Head Terms usually don’t convert very well.
Body Keywords:
Body keywords are 2-3 word phrases that get decent search volume (at least 2,000 searches per month), but are more specific than Head Keywords. Keywords like “life insurance” or “order vitamins online” are examples of Body Keywords. These almost always have lower competition than Head Terms, but can still be very competitive.
Long Tail Keywords:
Long tail keywords are long, 4+ word phrases that are usually very specific. Phrases like “affordable life insurance for senior citizens” and “order vitamin D capsules online” are examples of long tail keywords. Even though they don’t get a lot of search volume individually – when added together– long tails make up the majority of searches online.
I recommend putting most of your effort behind Body and Long Tail Keywords.
Why?
As you just read, Head Terms are a) super competitive and b) don’t convert well. So those are out.
In my opinion, Body Keywords hit the sweet spot of search volume, buyer intent and competition. And when you optimize pages around Body Keywords, you’ll usually rank for related long tails automatically. Not to mention the 15% of all keywords that have never been typed into a search engine before (!).
In other words, when you optimize for Body keywords, you tend to gobble up a lot of long tail traffic naturally from totally unique searches and from crazy long 5-12 word keywords (if you’ve ever checked your Analytics to see what people use to find your site, you know what types of looooong keywords I’m talking about).
Because they’re usually easier to rank for than Head or Body Keywords, many SEOs focus on Long Tail Keywords. Although Long Tail Keywords are less competitive (and tend to convert well), they’re not without problems.
What do I mean?
Remember that each Long Tail Keyword may only get 100-1000 searches per month. Which means – in order to get lots search engine traffic from long tails — you need to bang out dozens (or even hundreds) of articles…each optimized around a single Long Tail Keyword. Publishing reams long tail-focused content puts you at serious risk of a Google Panda penalty. In fact, companies like Demand Media and Suite101 lost millions betting on this strategy.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use long tails as part of your search engine optimization strategy (in fact, there’s an entire chapter in this guide dedicated to finding them). But don’t fall into the trap of banging out hundreds of pages hoping to rank for long tails.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that without keywords, there’s no such thing as SEO.
Keywords are like a compass for your SEO campaigns: they tell you where to go and whether or not you’re making progress.
They also help you figure out the thoughts, fears, and desires of your target market (as your Analytics stats will tell you, people type their inner-most thoughts into Google’s little search bar).
In fact, keyword research is just market research for the 21st century.
To Benefit from Keywords, You Need to Know How to Find (and Use) Them
If you can master the lost art of finding awesome keywords for your business — you’ll not only benefit from more search engine traffic – but you’ll also know your customers better than your competition.
Despite the importance of keyword selection, most people’s keyword research process looks something like this:
1 Come up with a few keywords that potential customers might search for
2 Plug those keywords into the Google Keyword Planner
3 Pick a keyword based on a vague combination of search volume and buyer intent
Well today, all that changes.
Because now you have a comprehensive guide that’s going to show you exactly how to find words and phrases that your target market uses to find information on the web.
And when you tailor your on-page SEO around the right keywords, you’ll watch your site rocket to the top of Google — landing you more leads, sales and commissions in the process.
But there’s a catch:
Before you fire up a keyword research tool or fiddle with a single title tag, you need to identify niche markets in your industry.
Once you find these niche markets, you’ll be able to tap into untapped buyer keywords that your competition doesn’t know about.
Niche Markets: Where (Smart) Keyword Research Starts
As I mentioned earlier, most people begin the process with a keyword research tool, like the Google Keyword Planner (GKP).
This is a HUGE mistake.
Why? Because as great as the GKP is at spitting out closely related keywords, it’s horrible at coming up with new keyword ideas.
Here’s an example:
What do you think of when you hear the word “basketball”?
Whether or not you’re a diehard fan, here are some words that may have popped into your head:
But when you enter the word “basketball” into the GKP “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” box…
…none of those related words show up.
In other words, the GKP only shows you keywords that are VERY intimately tied to the keyword you gave it.
Keywords that are closely – but not directly – related are rarely shown to you. And these are often the most profitable keywords in your market.
No wonder so many keywords are next to impossible to rank for: everyone and their mom are targeting the exact same keywords!
That’s not to say you shouldn’t target any keywords that the GKP gives you (in fact, there’s an entire chapter in this guide dedicated to using the tool).
But don’t rely on the GKP (or any other tool out there) to show you the full breadth of what’s out there.
To do that, you need to identify niche markets.
Niche Clouds: The Easiest Way to Find Niche Markets
You may be wondering:
“What is a Niche Market, exactly?”
A Niche Market is simply a sub-segment that’s part of a larger market.
For example, let’s say that you run a business that sells basketball hoops.
As we saw earlier, the GKP is essentially useless at giving you anything but very, very closely related keywords:
While some of these keywords might be a great fit for your business, there are dozens of others that are less competitive and are just as valuable to your site.
In my experience the easiest way to find these untapped keywords is to map out your industry’s Niche Clouds.
Niche Clouds are simple mind maps that identify niches that are closely related to your bread and butter niche.
For example, someone interested in buying a basketball hoop may also search for:
How to shoot a better free throw
Slam dunk highlights
How to get recruited by college scouts
Nutrition for athletes
How to improve a vertical jump
Each of those searches are part of a unique – but closely related – Niche Market.
For example, the keyword “How to shoot a better free throw” is part of the Niche Market “free throw shooting”.
Niche Markets are usually small-ish niches that aren’t large enough to support their own website or product.
In fact — while some Niche Markets will hook you up with 10 or more keywords – most will have only 2-5 keywords with enough search volume and commercial intent for you to actually optimize pages around.
But when you add them together you’ll often find that you have more low-competition keywords than you know what do with.
As I mentioned earlier, Niche Clouds makes finding all of the Niche Markets in your industry super-easy.
Here’s how to do it:
Creating Your First Niche Cloud Map
The goal with your Niche Cloud Map is to map out the different “clouds” that tend to float around your actual industry. Each cloud represents a Niche Market.
All you need to start is mind mapping software or (if you want to go old school) a pen and paper.
Here’s what our basketball hoop example would look as a Niche Cloud map:
You should be able to come up with at least 5 different Niche Markets off of the top of your head…which is enough to find some great keywords.
If you’re struggling – or want to find more Niche Markets – here are a few simple strategies you can tap into.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a super-simple way to identify other Niche Markets that potential customers belong to.
And once you identify these Niche Markets, you can easily find keywords that potential customers use when they’re not searching for your products and services (in other words, most of the time).
Your keyword research-focused buyer persona should include your target audience’s:
Gender
Age
Approximate income
Hobbies and interests (what they do for fun)
Things that they struggle with
What they want to accomplish (personally and professionally)
Depending on your niche you may have several different buyer personas.
For example, following our basketball hoop example, you might have buyer personas for basketball players AND for parents (who in many cases will be the ones that ultimately buy the product).
In my experience the easiest way to make a buyer persona is to create a PowerPoint slide:
This slide helps you get into the head of your target customer, which will help you think of with Niche Markets that you may have overlooked the first time you sat down with your Niche Cloud Map.
Forums
Forums are like having live focus groups at your fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The easiest way to find forums where your target audience hangs out is to use these search strings in Google:
“keyword” + “forums”
“keyword” + “forum
“keyword” + “board”
You can also use BoardReader.com, which is a search engine for forums.
1
First, click on “forums” in the top left corner of the screen:
First, click on “forums” in the top left corner of the screen:
2
Then, enter a keyword and hit “search”:
Then, enter a keyword and hit “search”:
3
Find forums that your target audience hangs out on:
Find forums that your target audience hangs out on:
4
Once you find a forum, note how the forum is divided up into sections: Each of these sections is often a Niche Market.
Once you find a forum, note how the forum is divided up into sections: Each of these sections is often a Niche Market.
5
To dig deeper, check out some of the threads on the forum to find other Niche Markets your ideal customer belongs to.
To dig deeper, check out some of the threads on the forum to find other Niche Markets your ideal customer belongs to.
In about 10 seconds I’ve identified 3 potential Niche Markets from a single basketball forum:
Basketball socks
Basketball confidence
Basketball accessories
One you’ve found a few Niche Markets that make sense for your site, add them to your Niche Cloud Map.
Wikipedia Table of Contents
Wikipedia is an often-overlooked goldmine of niche research.
Where else can you find overviews on a topic curated by thousands of industry experts and organized into neat little categories?
Here’s how to use Wikipedia to find Niche Markets.
1
First, head over to Wikipedia and type in a broad keyword:
That will take you to the Wikipedia entry for that broad topic.
2
Then, look for the “contents” section of the page:
3
And take a look at the sections of the page.
Some of these sections will be killer Niche Markets that you may not have found otherwise:
And take a look at the sections of the page.
Some of these sections will be killer Niche Markets that you may not have found otherwise:
4
You can also click on some of the internal links on the page to check out the Table of Contents of other, closely related entries.
For example, on the basketball entry we have a link to Rebounding:
You can also click on some of the internal links on the page to check out the Table of Contents of other, closely related entries.
For example, on the basketball entry we have a link to Rebounding:
5
When you click on that link, you’ll notice that the table of contents for the Rebounding page has a few more Niche Markets for you to add to your map:
When you click on that link, you’ll notice that the table of contents for the Rebounding page has a few more Niche Markets for you to add to your map:
In this case we found three more Niche Markets:
Types of rebounds (offensive, defensive)
Boxing out
Notable NBA rebounders
Easy, right?
The Head, Body and Tail
Now that you’ve identified a large group of Niche Markets it’s time to find some keywords!
Most people in SEO (myself included) divide keywords into three main categories: head, body and the (long) tail.
Head Keywords:
These are usually single-word keywords with insane amounts of search volume and competition (for example, “insurance” or “vitamins”). Because searcher intent is all over the place (someone searching for “insurance” might be looking for a car insurance quote, a list of life insurance companies or a definition of the word), Head Terms usually don’t convert very well.
Body Keywords:
Body keywords are 2-3 word phrases that get decent search volume (at least 2,000 searches per month), but are more specific than Head Keywords. Keywords like “life insurance” or “order vitamins online” are examples of Body Keywords. These almost always have lower competition than Head Terms, but can still be very competitive.
Long Tail Keywords:
Long tail keywords are long, 4+ word phrases that are usually very specific. Phrases like “affordable life insurance for senior citizens” and “order vitamin D capsules online” are examples of long tail keywords. Even though they don’t get a lot of search volume individually – when added together– long tails make up the majority of searches online.
I recommend putting most of your effort behind Body and Long Tail Keywords.
Why?
As you just read, Head Terms are a) super competitive and b) don’t convert well. So those are out.
In my opinion, Body Keywords hit the sweet spot of search volume, buyer intent and competition. And when you optimize pages around Body Keywords, you’ll usually rank for related long tails automatically. Not to mention the 15% of all keywords that have never been typed into a search engine before (!).
In other words, when you optimize for Body keywords, you tend to gobble up a lot of long tail traffic naturally from totally unique searches and from crazy long 5-12 word keywords (if you’ve ever checked your Analytics to see what people use to find your site, you know what types of looooong keywords I’m talking about).
Because they’re usually easier to rank for than Head or Body Keywords, many SEOs focus on Long Tail Keywords. Although Long Tail Keywords are less competitive (and tend to convert well), they’re not without problems.
What do I mean?
Remember that each Long Tail Keyword may only get 100-1000 searches per month. Which means – in order to get lots search engine traffic from long tails — you need to bang out dozens (or even hundreds) of articles…each optimized around a single Long Tail Keyword. Publishing reams long tail-focused content puts you at serious risk of a Google Panda penalty. In fact, companies like Demand Media and Suite101 lost millions betting on this strategy.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use long tails as part of your search engine optimization strategy (in fact, there’s an entire chapter in this guide dedicated to finding them). But don’t fall into the trap of banging out hundreds of pages hoping to rank for long tails.
How to Use the Google Keyword Planner
There’s no way around it: without objective data, keyword research is a shot in the dark.
Fortunately, the SEO Gods have given us an awesome (free) tool that tells us almost all of the information we need to make informed decisions about which keywords are best for our business. It’s called the Google Keyword Planner.
Unlike the now-defunct Google Keyword Tool, the new tool has an entire suite of features that will help you identify a keyword’s growing (or shrinking) popularity, filter out low-volume searches, and create hundreds of keyword combinations in seconds.
Sound cool?
It is.
Keep in mind that the tool is designed with Adwords advertisers in mind. So there are a lot of features in the tool (like keyword bidding features) that won’t be useful for you.
In this guide I’ll show you how to get the most SEO value out of the Google Keyword Planner.
Here’s how to use it.
STEP #1: ACCESS THE GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER
In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need to have a Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one already, you can set one up here:
(Just follow the prompts, enter some basic information about you and your business, and you’re in.)
Next, login to your Google Adwords account. Click on “Tools and Analysis” from the green toolbar and choose “Keyword Planner”:
You’ll be presented with four different tools within the Google Keyword Planner (under “What would you like to do?”):
You’ll only need to use these 3 tools for SEO-focused keyword research:
Search for new keyword and ad group ideas
Get search volume for a list of keyword or group them into ad groups
Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas
(In other words, you won’t ever need to use “Get traffic estimates for a list of keywords”. It’s a feature that only applies to Adwords advertisers.)
Now it’s time for me to show you how to find awesome keywords using each of the 3 tools built into the Google Keyword Planner.
STEP #2: CHOOSE YOUR TOOL
The Keyword Planner is a Swiss Army knife of different keyword research tools.
Here I’ll show you how to use the three tools within the Google Keyword Planner that will land you a fantastic list of keywords for your SEO campaigns.
Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas
This is the bread and butter tool that’s perfect for finding new keywords.
Keep in mind that the keywords you get from this tool are usually very closely based on the seed keywords you put into it (as we saw in The Introduction, the GKP doesn’t tend to generate completely new keyword ideas).
When you choose the “Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas“ tool, a menu appears with a list of options:
Let’s break down each of these options:
Enter one or more of the following
This is a REALLY important option. The value you get from the planner is largely based on the information that you enter here.
Here’s how to get the most out of it:
Your product or service: This is actually a list of keywords. You don’t want to enter a broad industry keyword like “flowers” (despite what the tool suggests) or you’ll end up with a list of super-competitive Head Keywords. I recommend entering 1-3 keywords here, each in a slightly different Niche Market. Following our example from The Introduction, you’d want to enter terms like “free throws” and “basketball accessories” here.
Your landing page: This is primarily for Adwords users. But you can sometimes find a few solid keywords here using your site’s homepage or an article from your site.
Your product category: This allows you to access Google’s internal database of keywords for different industries. You can sometimes find keywords here that you might have missed. It’s worth playing around with if you’re not able to find any keywords using the first two options
Once you’ve entered your information into one – or all three – of the options, it’s time to choose your “Targeting” options.
Targeting
Targeting is simply the country, language and search engine that you’re marketing on. These options are automatically set to target English-speaking people in the US searching in Google. If that’s your target audience (in most cases it will be), you can leave these options as they are.
But let’s say you’re based in Germany. You’d want to change the country to “Germany” and choose “German” as the language.
The last option is called “negative keywords”:
Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to advertise on. This is another feature that only applies to Adwords.
Customize your search
Here’s what each of these options mean:
Keyword filters: This simply allows you to filter out keywords that don’t meet a set of criteria. For example, let’s say that you weren’t interested in any keywords with less than 2000 monthly searches. Just click anywhere on the “Keyword filters” box and enter your minimum monthly search volume:
You can do the same thing with the suggested bid (which is a proxy measurement of commercial intent):
(“Ad impr. Share” is a feature that’s just for Adwords advertisers)
Keyword options: This simply tells the tool how broad you want your results to be. I recommend leaving this as-is. The other options (“Hide keywords in my plan” are Adwords-only options).
Include/Exclude: You can choose to either always include or always exclude certain keywords from showing up in the results.
Why would you want to exclude keywords?
Let’s say that you’re already ranking for a number of keywords related to “blue t shirts”, you don’t want those results to crowd out new keyword ideas.
If you have a list of keywords that you do or don’t want to see, simply click on the “Include/Exclude” button and add that list in the appropriate field:
Once you’re done, click on “Get Ideas” and you’ll see the Keywords Results Page. I’ll show you how to use that part of the Google Keyword Planner later in the guide.
Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups
This is a feature that’s useful if you already have a long list of keywords in hand and just want to quickly check their search volume. In other words, this tool won’t help you generate new keyword ideas.
You can either copy and paste a list of keywords into the search field or upload your list in a CSV file:
Although the tool claims that you can you can specify a match type (like the old Google Keyword Tool)…
…I’ve found the search volume information to be EXACTLY the same no matter what match type that I use:
So it doesn’t look like Google supports this feature anymore.
No big deal. You want to see exact match information 99% of the time anyway. And that’s what the Google Keyword Planner shows you by default.
You can target your result’s language and country here just like you did with the “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” tool:
Finally, click “Get search volume” to see how many people search for the keywords you entered.
Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas
This tool takes groups of keywords and mashes them together into hundreds (or even thousands) of combinations. Most of the results will be gibberish, but the tool will occasionally spit out a gem.
This tool is especially helpful for ecommerce keyword research because it helps you identify almost every possible combination people use to search for your products.
First, enter a list of keywords into “List 1”:
And another list into “List 2”:
You can add a third field by clicking on the grey “X”:
When you do, simply add another set of keywords in “List 3”:
When you’re done, click on “Get search volume”, and you’ll be able to see what keywords the tool came up with.
STEP #3: USING THE KEYWORDS RESULTS PAGE
All three of the tools I described will take you to the “Keywords Results Page”, which looks like this:
Here’s a breakdown of the page:
On the left hand sidebar, you have the same targeting and filtering options you saw on the last page:
The advantage of using them here is that you can modify your results after you’ve performed your search. So if you’re getting a lot of low volume keywords, you can simply filter out all keywords that don’t meet a certain search volume.
Next, you have two tabs: “Ad group ideas” and “Keyword ideas”:
Most people will tell you to quickly click over to “Keyword ideas” and ignore “Ad group ideas”. This is a HUGE mistake. As you’ll see in a minute, you can usually find great keywords from the “Ad group ideas” tab.
When you do click over to the “Keyword ideas” tab, this is what you’ll see:
Here’s what each of the terms in this area mean:
Search Terms: These are the exact keywords that you entered in step 2.
Keyword (by relevance): This is the list of keywords that Google considers most relevant to the “Search Term” keyword.
Avg. monthly searches: Pretty self-explanatory. However, keep in mind that this is a rough estimate and not a super-accurate indicator of search volume. Also, certain seasonal keywords (like “Halloween costumes”) may get 50,000 searches in October and 100 in May. So the average monthly searches can be somewhat misleading in some cases.
(Graph Icon): When you hover over this little icon:
The tool will show you search trends for that keyword over the last year.
This is useful for identifying keywords with large seasonal fluctuations. It also helps you determine if a search term is becoming more or less popular over time.
Competition: This reflects the number of advertisers bidding on that keyword (you can read more about how to determine commercial intent in Chapter 3: How to Determine a Keyword’s Commercial Intent).
Suggested bid: Yet another rock-solid determinant of a keyword’s monetization potential. The higher the suggested bid, the more lucrative the traffic.
STEP #4: FIND AWESOME KEYWORDS
Now that you know how to use all of the tools, features and options within the Google Keyword Planner, it’s time for the last step: finding awesome keywords that you can optimize your site’s content around.
(For this step I’m going to be using the Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas tool because this is the best tool within the Google Keyword Planner for finding new keywords)
First, come up with a keyword that’s somewhat broad…but also describes your product, service or content idea somewhat specifically.
(If you developed a list of Niche Markets from the introduction, you want to use them here)
For example, let’s say that you ran an ecommerce site that sold organic food.
If you wanted to write a blog post about the health benefits of organic coffee, you wouldn’t want to use the keyword “coffee” (too broad) or “health benefits of organic coffee” (too narrow). A keyword like “organic coffee” would work well.
Enter that keyword into the field labeled “your product or service”:
And click “Get ideas”:
The first thing you want to do is take a look at some of the Ad group names listed here:
You can sometimes find awesome Niche Markets or keyword ideas from the names of the Ad groups themselves.
Next, click on one of the Ad group names:
And see what keywords make up this Ad group:
Another place to find great keywords that don’t show up under the “Keyword ideas” tab.
Jot down any that seem like they might be a good fit for this piece of content (or for another page on your site).
Next, click on the “keyword ideas” tab:
And take a look at the keywords that come up:
How do you know which keywords to choose?
There are dozens of different factors to consider, but I prefer to evaluate keywords based on 3 main criteria:
Search Volume: Very straightforward. The higher, the better.
Commercial Intent: Determining the monetization potential of a keyword is more of an art than a science (that’s why I’ve created an entire chapter in Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide) — Chapter 3 – to commercial intent). In general, the higher the competition and suggested bid, the easier it will be to convert that traffic into paying customers.
Organic SEO Competition: Like commercial intent, evaluating a keyword’s competition in Google’s organic search results takes some more digging. Chapter 4: Keyword Competition Analysis covers everything you need to know about sizing up your competition.
That’s all there is to it. By now you should have a hefty list of potential keywords. Nice work!
Fortunately, the SEO Gods have given us an awesome (free) tool that tells us almost all of the information we need to make informed decisions about which keywords are best for our business. It’s called the Google Keyword Planner.
Unlike the now-defunct Google Keyword Tool, the new tool has an entire suite of features that will help you identify a keyword’s growing (or shrinking) popularity, filter out low-volume searches, and create hundreds of keyword combinations in seconds.
Sound cool?
It is.
Keep in mind that the tool is designed with Adwords advertisers in mind. So there are a lot of features in the tool (like keyword bidding features) that won’t be useful for you.
In this guide I’ll show you how to get the most SEO value out of the Google Keyword Planner.
Here’s how to use it.
STEP #1: ACCESS THE GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER
In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need to have a Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one already, you can set one up here:
(Just follow the prompts, enter some basic information about you and your business, and you’re in.)
Next, login to your Google Adwords account. Click on “Tools and Analysis” from the green toolbar and choose “Keyword Planner”:
You’ll be presented with four different tools within the Google Keyword Planner (under “What would you like to do?”):
You’ll only need to use these 3 tools for SEO-focused keyword research:
Search for new keyword and ad group ideas
Get search volume for a list of keyword or group them into ad groups
Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas
(In other words, you won’t ever need to use “Get traffic estimates for a list of keywords”. It’s a feature that only applies to Adwords advertisers.)
Now it’s time for me to show you how to find awesome keywords using each of the 3 tools built into the Google Keyword Planner.
STEP #2: CHOOSE YOUR TOOL
The Keyword Planner is a Swiss Army knife of different keyword research tools.
Here I’ll show you how to use the three tools within the Google Keyword Planner that will land you a fantastic list of keywords for your SEO campaigns.
Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas
This is the bread and butter tool that’s perfect for finding new keywords.
Keep in mind that the keywords you get from this tool are usually very closely based on the seed keywords you put into it (as we saw in The Introduction, the GKP doesn’t tend to generate completely new keyword ideas).
When you choose the “Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas“ tool, a menu appears with a list of options:
Let’s break down each of these options:
Enter one or more of the following
This is a REALLY important option. The value you get from the planner is largely based on the information that you enter here.
Here’s how to get the most out of it:
Your product or service: This is actually a list of keywords. You don’t want to enter a broad industry keyword like “flowers” (despite what the tool suggests) or you’ll end up with a list of super-competitive Head Keywords. I recommend entering 1-3 keywords here, each in a slightly different Niche Market. Following our example from The Introduction, you’d want to enter terms like “free throws” and “basketball accessories” here.
Your landing page: This is primarily for Adwords users. But you can sometimes find a few solid keywords here using your site’s homepage or an article from your site.
Your product category: This allows you to access Google’s internal database of keywords for different industries. You can sometimes find keywords here that you might have missed. It’s worth playing around with if you’re not able to find any keywords using the first two options
Once you’ve entered your information into one – or all three – of the options, it’s time to choose your “Targeting” options.
Targeting
Targeting is simply the country, language and search engine that you’re marketing on. These options are automatically set to target English-speaking people in the US searching in Google. If that’s your target audience (in most cases it will be), you can leave these options as they are.
But let’s say you’re based in Germany. You’d want to change the country to “Germany” and choose “German” as the language.
The last option is called “negative keywords”:
Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to advertise on. This is another feature that only applies to Adwords.
Customize your search
Here’s what each of these options mean:
Keyword filters: This simply allows you to filter out keywords that don’t meet a set of criteria. For example, let’s say that you weren’t interested in any keywords with less than 2000 monthly searches. Just click anywhere on the “Keyword filters” box and enter your minimum monthly search volume:
You can do the same thing with the suggested bid (which is a proxy measurement of commercial intent):
(“Ad impr. Share” is a feature that’s just for Adwords advertisers)
Keyword options: This simply tells the tool how broad you want your results to be. I recommend leaving this as-is. The other options (“Hide keywords in my plan” are Adwords-only options).
Include/Exclude: You can choose to either always include or always exclude certain keywords from showing up in the results.
Why would you want to exclude keywords?
Let’s say that you’re already ranking for a number of keywords related to “blue t shirts”, you don’t want those results to crowd out new keyword ideas.
If you have a list of keywords that you do or don’t want to see, simply click on the “Include/Exclude” button and add that list in the appropriate field:
Once you’re done, click on “Get Ideas” and you’ll see the Keywords Results Page. I’ll show you how to use that part of the Google Keyword Planner later in the guide.
Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups
This is a feature that’s useful if you already have a long list of keywords in hand and just want to quickly check their search volume. In other words, this tool won’t help you generate new keyword ideas.
You can either copy and paste a list of keywords into the search field or upload your list in a CSV file:
Although the tool claims that you can you can specify a match type (like the old Google Keyword Tool)…
…I’ve found the search volume information to be EXACTLY the same no matter what match type that I use:
So it doesn’t look like Google supports this feature anymore.
No big deal. You want to see exact match information 99% of the time anyway. And that’s what the Google Keyword Planner shows you by default.
You can target your result’s language and country here just like you did with the “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” tool:
Finally, click “Get search volume” to see how many people search for the keywords you entered.
Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas
This tool takes groups of keywords and mashes them together into hundreds (or even thousands) of combinations. Most of the results will be gibberish, but the tool will occasionally spit out a gem.
This tool is especially helpful for ecommerce keyword research because it helps you identify almost every possible combination people use to search for your products.
First, enter a list of keywords into “List 1”:
And another list into “List 2”:
You can add a third field by clicking on the grey “X”:
When you do, simply add another set of keywords in “List 3”:
When you’re done, click on “Get search volume”, and you’ll be able to see what keywords the tool came up with.
STEP #3: USING THE KEYWORDS RESULTS PAGE
All three of the tools I described will take you to the “Keywords Results Page”, which looks like this:
Here’s a breakdown of the page:
On the left hand sidebar, you have the same targeting and filtering options you saw on the last page:
The advantage of using them here is that you can modify your results after you’ve performed your search. So if you’re getting a lot of low volume keywords, you can simply filter out all keywords that don’t meet a certain search volume.
Next, you have two tabs: “Ad group ideas” and “Keyword ideas”:
Most people will tell you to quickly click over to “Keyword ideas” and ignore “Ad group ideas”. This is a HUGE mistake. As you’ll see in a minute, you can usually find great keywords from the “Ad group ideas” tab.
When you do click over to the “Keyword ideas” tab, this is what you’ll see:
Here’s what each of the terms in this area mean:
Search Terms: These are the exact keywords that you entered in step 2.
Keyword (by relevance): This is the list of keywords that Google considers most relevant to the “Search Term” keyword.
Avg. monthly searches: Pretty self-explanatory. However, keep in mind that this is a rough estimate and not a super-accurate indicator of search volume. Also, certain seasonal keywords (like “Halloween costumes”) may get 50,000 searches in October and 100 in May. So the average monthly searches can be somewhat misleading in some cases.
(Graph Icon): When you hover over this little icon:
The tool will show you search trends for that keyword over the last year.
This is useful for identifying keywords with large seasonal fluctuations. It also helps you determine if a search term is becoming more or less popular over time.
Competition: This reflects the number of advertisers bidding on that keyword (you can read more about how to determine commercial intent in Chapter 3: How to Determine a Keyword’s Commercial Intent).
Suggested bid: Yet another rock-solid determinant of a keyword’s monetization potential. The higher the suggested bid, the more lucrative the traffic.
STEP #4: FIND AWESOME KEYWORDS
Now that you know how to use all of the tools, features and options within the Google Keyword Planner, it’s time for the last step: finding awesome keywords that you can optimize your site’s content around.
(For this step I’m going to be using the Search for New Keyword and Ad Group Ideas tool because this is the best tool within the Google Keyword Planner for finding new keywords)
First, come up with a keyword that’s somewhat broad…but also describes your product, service or content idea somewhat specifically.
(If you developed a list of Niche Markets from the introduction, you want to use them here)
For example, let’s say that you ran an ecommerce site that sold organic food.
If you wanted to write a blog post about the health benefits of organic coffee, you wouldn’t want to use the keyword “coffee” (too broad) or “health benefits of organic coffee” (too narrow). A keyword like “organic coffee” would work well.
Enter that keyword into the field labeled “your product or service”:
And click “Get ideas”:
The first thing you want to do is take a look at some of the Ad group names listed here:
You can sometimes find awesome Niche Markets or keyword ideas from the names of the Ad groups themselves.
Next, click on one of the Ad group names:
And see what keywords make up this Ad group:
Another place to find great keywords that don’t show up under the “Keyword ideas” tab.
Jot down any that seem like they might be a good fit for this piece of content (or for another page on your site).
Next, click on the “keyword ideas” tab:
And take a look at the keywords that come up:
How do you know which keywords to choose?
There are dozens of different factors to consider, but I prefer to evaluate keywords based on 3 main criteria:
Search Volume: Very straightforward. The higher, the better.
Commercial Intent: Determining the monetization potential of a keyword is more of an art than a science (that’s why I’ve created an entire chapter in Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide) — Chapter 3 – to commercial intent). In general, the higher the competition and suggested bid, the easier it will be to convert that traffic into paying customers.
Organic SEO Competition: Like commercial intent, evaluating a keyword’s competition in Google’s organic search results takes some more digging. Chapter 4: Keyword Competition Analysis covers everything you need to know about sizing up your competition.
That’s all there is to it. By now you should have a hefty list of potential keywords. Nice work!
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