Best Practices for Using Keyword Tools

Keyword tools do not tell you what keywords you should use; they give you keyword suggestions that you can choose to either use or bypass. Using keyword tools is essential to researching the full breadth of keyword possibilities for your account. Keywords are thought processes, and everyone thinks differently.

• The Keywords Planner should be one of the first tools you utilize when you are conducting keyword research.
• Use the Search For New Keyword And Ad Group Ideas option of the Keyword Planner when you have one or more words and would like suggestions based on that information.
• Use the landing page option in the Keyword Planner when you wish to extract data from a website. Try entering your website, your competitor’s website, search results, or the dictionary to find new keywords. Whenever you see a page on the Web and think that page is highly related to your products, enter the page into the tool to see if there are new keywords that are relevant to your account.
• Once you find keywords with the Keyword Planner, you can either estimate traffic for those keywords or export them for organization for later use.
• To estimate traffic for your keywords and ad group, use the estimate section in the Keyword Planner.
• When estimating traffic, you must input a bid into the bid box to see data by ad group.
• Use the graph in the Keyword Planner estimates to determine the best starting bid for your budget.
• Google Trends is useful for looking backward in time to help you project changes in keyword search volume.
• Always remember with Google Trends that the data is not absolute but is relative to the geography’s population size and the propensity of its inhabitants to search for a keyword or visit a particular site.
• Google Trends can help you in many unique ways, such as by crafting marketing messages or seeing the differences between multiple locations.

Finding keywords is not difficult, although it can be time consuming. It’s important that you understand the search intent behind the keyword; that way, you can show the searchers compelling ad copy so they will visit your website. In the next chapter, we will discuss how to write effective ads based on the keywords you have found.