As you probably know, the key to conversions is largely in getting organic traffic from search engine results. Getting those organic hits is dependent upon your ability to find the right keywords to include in your landing pages, blogs, and other content. This is where the Google Keyword Planner comes into play. If you’ve never used it before, Keyword Planner is a tool that Google provides, for free, to users who want to increase traffic to their websites and blogs. It does this by providing a means to find the best keywords for your business. The following tutorial will serve as a bit of a guide.
Why do Keyword Research?
The purpose of this tool is to help you to determine how the keywords you are using, or that you plan to use, perform. You can also use the tool to see how various keywords are performing for your competitors. This tool is extremely useful for content creation and planning, and for creating your content marketing budget.
Which Keywords Should You Analyze?
If you are unsure of which keywords you should analyze, here are a few suggestions:• Keywords from previous campaigns
• Keywords from popular blogs and articles
• Your competitors’ keywords
• Trending keywords
If you still aren’t sure of the keywords you wish to analyze. Tools such as BuzzSumo, Alltop, and Keyword tool.IO can help you to find potential keywords and trending content that you can mine for words and phrases.
Getting The Basics Out of The Way
First things first. To get started, create an adwords account. Go to google.com/adwords/. Once this is done, you can log into your account. You can get to the planner tool by clicking on ‘Tools and Analysis’ and selecting the ‘Keyword Planner’.Searching For New Keywords
You will probably want to begin by selecting the option to search for new keywords using one of the following:• Phrase
• Website
• Category
When you take this option, you will be presented with a form. You can enter in your product/service, landing page, category, or any combination of the three. Then, you can target according to location, language, search engine, date range, etc. You can even use filters to help narrow or widen your options.
If you enter data into the product/service category, separate words and phrases using commas.
Try entering a URL for one of your landing pages. The tool will then return suggestions to you based on your existing content. Isn’t that cool? Here’s something even cooler! You don’t have to limit yourself to entering in your URLs. You can enter:
• Website addresses for your competitor’s pages
• URLs for discussion forums related to your products/services
• The internet addresses for publications and review sites in your industry
Use your imagination, and you will find combinations of entries that will help you get great SEO results, and position your business to be as competitive as possible.
The next option you have is to select a product category. In this case, Google provides you with a list to choose from. For example, you can select from:
• Sports and fitness
• Jobs and education
• Vehicles
• Hobbies and leisure
• Internet and telecom
• Beauty and personal care
• Business and industrial
Your selections are pretty much unlimited.
You can continue your research by targeting by location, and other options. You can even use Google Maps to specifically pinpoint the locations that you wish to use to narrow down your results.
Finally, you can use negative keywords to prevent the tool from returning irrelevant keywords to you. For example, let’s say that your business name contains the word ‘patriot’. In that case, you might want to exclude keywords that refer to New England Patriots.
Bringing Money Into It
If you are thinking about paying for clicks or are worried about ad impressions, you can even filter for keywords that will give you the best return for your advertising dollar.Search Volume Trends And Data
This option accepts much of the same input as the previous option. However, in addition to entering keywords, you can also upload a TXT or CSV file that contains keywords. You can then narrow things down using date range and other targeting options. Taking this option returns data such as average monthly searches and keyword performance for your competitors. There is also information that is useful to those who are interested in paid advertising options. If you are planning an ad campaign, this information can be particularly useful. This is especially true if you are trying to figure out your budget or get an estimate on your PPC costs.Conclusion
The Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for research. It’s usefulness is enhanced by the fact that it is absolutely free. You can use it to plan your next paid advertising plan, or simply to determine the best content for driving traffic to your landing pages.About the Author:
Carolyn Williams is a passionate blogger and content writer at EssayKittens. She mostly writes about blogging, social media, SEO, and marketing. Connect with Carolyn via Twitter, Facebook.
