How To Use Google Keyword Planner To Find The Best Keywords

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Google Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for finding keywords that have the potential to bring huge traffic to your website.

It is a tool that many people underestimate, mainly because it’s free or they think it’s complicated.

But doing keyword research using Google keyword planner is not that daunting.

It is, in fact, simple and easy to use.

In this article, I will show you how to use Google keyword planner to find keywords that will bring organic traffic to your website.

So, let’s begin.

Step 1: Head over to Google keyword planner

The good thing about Google’s keyword planner is that it’s totally free. To be able to have access to the tool, you will need a Google account.

How to access keyword planner

Go to Google Keyword Planner and click on the switch to the Expert mode link.

You don’t have to actually run Ads to get access to the planner, but you will need to create an Ads account.

Now you will get a screen where it will ask you to “Select a goal that will make this campaign successful to you.”

You don’t need to select any goal as you will have an option to create an account without a campaign.

At the bottom, you can see “Create an account without a campaign.”

Click on the link, and you will get a screen where you will have to enter some basic information concerning your account.

Make sure that information such as Billing Country, Time zone, and Currency are correct. Then submit the information to Google.

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You can “Explore your campaign.”

Now you will be directed to an empty campaign page. You will notice at the top right you will have a “Tool and settings” Icon.

Click on it and select “Keyword Planner.”

Voila, you can use the keyword planner.

You see, it wasn’t that difficult to set up an account.

Now you can bookmark the page so that next time you can access it easily.

As you can see, there are two different tools in the keyword planner.

The first one is “Discover new keywords,” and the second tool is “Get search volumes and forecasts.”

So, what are they really used for?

Discover new keywords

If you are looking for keyword opportunities, then this feature will be of great use. This feature will allow you to find new keywords and get some insights into the related search terms.

Get search volumes and forecasts.

Once you have found your keyword in the “Discover new keywords” feature, you will now use the “Get search volumes and forecasts” feature to find keyword search volumes.

Google keyword planner is a powerful tool because it will give you estimated search volumes, estimated costs, CTR, and average CPC.

This tool has been designed for PPC advertisers, so some features won’t be useful to you if you don’t plan to run any ads campaign.

You can ignore them for the time being.

Let’s now see how you can find SEO keywords.

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Step 2: Find new keywords.

Head over to the “Discover new keywords” feature.

Here you will be given two options. One is “Start with the keyword,” and the second one is “Start with a website.”

“Start with keywords“: This is where you can enter words that relate to your business. For example, if your blog is about gardening, you will enter the term “gardening” to get all related searches for this term.

“Start with a website”: You also have the option to enter a URL to find keywords that the website is ranking for. This can be very useful if you want to know what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

I will show you how to get keywords by this method in the last section.

Tip: Since I am located in Mauritius, It will show “Mauritius” as the default location. But, you will want to search for terms that can be ranked globally. So, you will need to remove your default country.

How can you change that?

Well, it’s easy. Just click on your default country, and it will give you a new window.

Click on “X” to remove and click “Save.”

Now let’s do keyword research.

Enter your keyword (I will enter “gardening”) where it says “Enter products or services closely related to your business” and click on “Get results.”

As you can notice, it gives me a list of 774 keywords related to the term “Gardening” sorted by relevance.

The top related keywords have around 100k-1 Million searches per month. Since these keywords have such a high search volume, it will be better to ignore them.

You can also disregard the other tabs such as “competition” and “Page bid” because they are meant for ads only.

Step 3: Filter the results to get the best keywords

Now, it’s time to go a little bit deeper to find keywords suitable for your niche.

The term “Gardening” is too broad, and it will be challenging to get a high ranking for that specific keyword.

You want to write an article on “Hydroponic,” and you are searching for related keywords.

Enter the term “Hydroponic” in the search results and click on “Get results.”

As you can see, I got some related keywords like:

Hydroponic system
Hydroponic farming
Hydroponic garden

You can choose any one of them. I am going to choose “Hydroponic farming” and see which keywords suggestion I am getting.

Let’s do that.

Some of the results that I am getting are:

Hydroponic farming at home
Hydroponic container
Hydroponic farm start-up cost
General hydroponics water farm
Hydroponic lettuce farm
Vertical hydroponic farming

These keywords will make excellent blog posts. Let’s say you want to write a blog post on “Hydroponic farming at home.”

Let’s do a final search, shall we?

This is the final result that we have been waiting for.

Here we have a list of some of the best keywords that are closely related to “Hydroponic farming at home,” which are:

Growing hydroponic vegetables– You can write a blog article on how to grow hydroponic vegetables.
Indoor hydroponic farming– You can write about the different methods for indoor hydroponic farming.
Hydroponic farming on the terrace– You can write how people can do hydroponic farming on their balcony.

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Step 4. Finding keywords using “Start with a website.”

If you want to find keywords for a specific website, you can do this using the “Start with a website” feature.

Head over to the “Discover new keywords feature” and select “Start with a website.”

Let’s say your niche is about blogging, and you want to know which keywords your competitor is ranking for.

And this time, I am your competitor.

SO, you will use my domain name to know the keywords that I am ranking for.

You will enter viableblog.com and select “Use the entire site.” Now you will click on “Get results.”

Since my blog is mainly about blogging, you can see most of the keywords are related to blogging.

You can also analyze a specific blog post to know the exact keywords that the blog is ranking for.

Let’s do that.

The method will be the same, but this time instead of choosing “Use the entire site,” we will select “Use only this page.”

I have chosen the post “How to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog” to get keywords only related to this specific blog post.

Tip: You can use some of these keywords and refine your search ( as discussed in step 3) to get the best keywords.

Pro Tips:

Pro tip 1. Keywords that have high search volumes(100k-1M) have high competition. So, it will be better to ignore them when you are new to blogging.

Pro tip 2. If you are a new blogger, your blog’s domain authority is low, use keywords that have (100-1k) monthly search volumes. You can also use keywords with (10-100) monthly search volumes because it will be much easier to rank these keywords.

Pro tip 3. Always refine your search to “All locations.”

Conclusion: How to use google planner

I hope that this article will help you find better keywords for your blog posts.

Remember, targeting the right keywords is crucial if you want to get organic traffic to your website.

There is another way you can find kick-ass keywords using Google search and Google trends. See you there!

If you are new to blogging, then you may find these resources helpful:

If you liked this post, please don’t forget to share it with others so that they can benefit from it too.

See you soon!