In this guide, you’ll learn how to get some serious SEO value from Keyword Planner.
Google Keyword Planner is free. All you need is a Google Ads account to use it.
If you don’t already have one of these, Google makes you jump through a few hoops to get access. It’s still free, but it might require a temporary hold of a few bucks on your credit card.
There’s no point in trying to rank for irrelevant keywords, so the best starting point is to filter out keywords that don’t make sense to target.
For example, say that you’re looking for keyword ideas related to T-shirts for an online clothing store.
Here are a few ideas and ways to do this:
Long-tail keywords are keywords that get a few monthly searches. Because of this, they tend to be easier to rank for than popular keywords.
Keyword Planner doesn’t show the exact number of monthly searches for keywords, but it does show the average monthly range. So you can easily find long-tail keywords by sorting the ideas by average monthly searches from low to high.
Unfortunately, Keyword Planner can’t help you figure that out because its “competition” metric has nothing to do with organic search competition. It’s the competition level in Google Ads. As such, you should pay absolutely no attention to it.
Instead, we recommend plugging keyword ideas into a third-party tool like our free Keyword Difficulty (KD) checker. This estimates the difficulty of ranking on the first page of Google on a scale from 0 to 100.
You can find breakout topics if you sort keyword ideas by this column from highest to lowest.
If you run an affiliate website, this is an excellent way to find products worth reviewing.
Keyword Planner also has a “three month change” metric. This shows the change in search trends between the latest month and the two months prior.
You can find seasonal topics if you sort keyword ideas by this column from highest to lowest.
Now, advertisers have nothing to do with SEO. But it’s logical to assume that if they’re willing to pay a lot for clicks from a keyword, it must have commercial value. In which case, it’s worth trying to rank organically.
Now you know the basics of using Keyword Planner, let’s look at a few tricks and tips that most SEOs aren’t aware of.
Google’s reluctance to show exact search volumes is one of the most frustrating things about Keyword Planner. It’s why many SEOs no longer use the tool.
Most keyword research tools don’t tell you how many people search for a term in specific states or cities. They only show search volumes for the entire country, which could be better for local SEO.
In Google Keyword Planner, however, you can simply change your location to a different country, state, or city to see local volume ranges.
After all, if few people are searching for your topic on mobile, then you don’t need to stress too much about perfectly optimizing your content for mobile users.
Google Keyword Planner is a powerful tool worth incorporating into your keyword research workflow. It’s packed with valuable insights you can’t get from other tools.
But it does have its limitations—the lack of accurate search volumes being a big one.
If that’s what you’re looking for, investing in a professional keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer is the way to go. This shows exact search volumes for all keywords and other useful metrics like Keyword Difficulty (KD) and Traffic Potential (TP).