How to Use Google Keyword Planner to Build A List of Keywords

In this podcast “Digital Dave” extends the previous episode on “How to Use Googe Trends To Pick A Niche” (http://smallbizmarketingspecialist.com/show21) by spelling specifically how to use the Google Keyword Planner tool to find and plan out your SEO keyword strategy for keywords in a niche you have chosen.

Episode Transcript

Hello, everyone. This is Digital Dave, and we’re back again for another episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology. On today’s episode we’re going to be covering an extension of a previous episode where we talked about Google Trends, and how you can use Google Trends to help identify niches where the traffic is typically, hopefully trending upward, but not always necessarily does it have to work.

When we were on that episode, we discussed using keywords, or longer tail keywords that would help you drive traffic, more traffic to your pages and your site than if you used may be the key topic words. In that episode, we used health as our example, and we covered some topics such as “anxiety”, “depression”, “weight loss”, “back pain”, etc. From that episode, we chose to focus in on “anxiety”. It was the one with the most up-trending chart in Google Trends.

Today, in a continuation, we’re going to show you how to use the Google Keyword Planner, which is a part of Google Analytics. You have to have a Google Analytics account or a Google account to access this. The purpose is, and the reason they give it to you for free is that if you have a Google Analytics account they’re hoping that you are also paying for some traffic, and this has some great tools to help you with forecasting traffic for keywords that you’re already advertising for as well, and we’ll review that real quickly here.

Today we’re going to go through the Google Keyword Planner, and you get to that through your Google Analytics account tools and Keyword Planner. Once you’re there you’ll get to a screen that it says Google AdWords, but it’s actually Keyword Planner as well. On the left menu here you have some different search options available to you. We’re going to spend our time here searching for keyword using phrase, website, or category, because I want to review this is the most extensive search available.

Then you have down here some forecasting tools to plan for keywords going forward, and what the cost of those keywords might look for if you’re bidding for them. The purpose of their information is to show you if you’re bidding for these keywords what you might pay-per-click, and which of these keywords would be the easiest and least expensive to rank for as well if you were trying to just get standard search engine traffic. You can kind of use this data to translate into keyword planning for SEO based traffic.

With that, we’re going to go into just the first search method here today. Like I said, this is the most extensive and gives you the most option, and kind of covers the other ones anyway. But, we’ll just kind of walk through this a field at a time, and then we’ll go back and do a couple searches, an extension of what we had done in our Google Trends episode (http://smallbizmarketingspecialist.com/show21).

If you walk down here you can enter a keyword or keywords. Your landing page, this is kind of nice if you have a page that you’re trying to rank for keywords you can put the page in here, and it’ll actually go grab what it thinks the keywords for this page are and give you an analysis and breakdown of how that page is doing as far as what keywords it’s looking at and how they rank, and how competitive they are. You can use a product category. For instance, if you’re a store and you are selling a product you can pick from the list here of all the different categories and it’ll give you ideas within that category.

Then down here it gives you some options for narrowing down your searches. I’m not going to go through all of these. You can click on them yourself and kind of figure out what they do as far as limiting the searches. You’ve got locations. You’ve got the language. I did preset the language here to English only. I want to make sure my searches are only translated into English. Here you can pick if you want just Google search, or do you want Google and partner search.

If you want to extend your search a little bit, you can add the partners here. Then you can add any negative keywords that you do not want to be included in the planning forecast keywords that come up once we put in our base keyword. We’re going to go ahead and get right into this. We’re going to type in, again as we said from our previous episode we used “anxiety” as our trend because it was really the most up-trending keyword that we could find of some basic health terms. Just a few short health terms. I’m sure there are plenty others, but this is the one we picked.

We’re going to expand on this today, and we’re going to look for some search volumes within the anxiety niche, specifically looking at more longer tail phrases. Generally, if I were going out to try to SEO my page or my content I’m not going to be focusing on the word “anxiety”. I know almost by default it’s going to be very difficult to rank my content out there against some of the major authority sites out there in the health niche, so I’m going to need to look deeper into “anxiety” and find some keywords that I can probably get some traffic from.

We’re going to start with putting in the word “anxiety”, and narrowing it to English. This is for 12 months, and we’re going to go ahead and click get ideas here, and it’s going to come up and it’s going to give us the trendline for the word “anxiety”, which for the last 12 months the searches, and it looks very similar to the trendline we saw in Google Trends. It was kind of flat for this year, but it was an uptrend over a longer period of time.

Then within that what it does is it gives you the keyword that you’ve placed here, and it gives you the average monthly searches. This is a million searches a month, obviously a lot there. It says competition is low for this. Now, at 72 cents a click you can decide if that is low. That’s a suggested bid. You don’t have to bid that. You bid based on where you want to place on a page, and maybe you don’t need to place at the top to get traffic, so maybe you could bid lower than that, but they say the competition is low for this keyword.

Then what they do is they then take that keyword and they break it down into some additional, typically longer tail keywords, but not necessarily. Some that are just less searched like “bipolar”, I’m getting 673,000, “panic attack” is a good one, “anxiety”, “anxiety symptoms”, we saw that. “Anxiety disorder” gets a good number of searches, “anxiety attack”. These longer tail phrases or, dual or triple keywords generally are easier to rank for SEO purposes than if you’re searching for a topic related keyword such as “anxiety”.

I’m looking for ideas here of where I can find some longer tail keywords. “Obsessive-compulsive disorder”, it’s 110,000, low, it’s 42 cents if I wanted to bid on that. I’m really looking for the ones that have a low competition, and probably a low bid price. The reason being is that there’s not a lot of people bidding for that keyword. So, “anxiety test”, “panic attack symptoms”, 74,000.

This is a good one, “panic attack”, two-word keyword here with a low competition. 74,000 average monthly searches a month, so if I were to rank highly for that then I could certainly pick up some traffic. If I wanted to bid on it, I could probably bid less than 39 cents and still rank on the first page. Probably, again this is sometimes more of an art than it is a science, but you get the idea.

Now what I want to do is I want to say, okay let’s say I am going to use the word “panic attack symptoms” as one of my keywords. I could expand then and put that in here to get additional ideas. “Panic attack symptoms”, as it said, it comes back 74,000, bid low, suggested bid 39 cents, and then actually interestingly enough a shorter-tail keyword that seems to be less competitive with more search volume is “panic attack”. It’s bidding at 26 cents, it’s low competition, and it’s only two words, so I would probably consider using either “anxiety attack” or “panic attack” as some of my keywords. Then you can continue to go down.

You can change the sort order by clicking on these columns. If I wanted to see lowest to highest based on the bid I could click on this, or by competition, it would sort them all by this. Then this gives you the actual, the search trend bar graph for that for the last 12 months in a quick view. That’s kind of how you use the Keyword Planner, and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get a list of keywords that you’re going to rank your content for over time. You can download this and keep this locally available, which is a good idea, and then you can narrow down your list of keywords. That’s a great way to use the Keyword Planner to expand on a trend, a Google trend.

We took the trend of “anxiety”, an up-trending searched word. We then said, okay I’m going to try to rank SEO wise in my content for something relating to anxiety, so we use the Keyword Planner to go in and find some longer tail keywords that would give us probably a better chance of getting some search volume from Google directly without bidding. Now, we could also bid on this, and for something like panic attack I could put together a nice piece of content and try to rank for it, but certainly, I could put in an ad in AdWords, and probably get a pretty decent per-click price for “panic attacks”.

What’s nice about this is that once you build in AdWords, if you decide to run some ads you can actually click on their forecasting tools now and it’ll give you what they think you would get as far as clicks and what the cost would be. So, if you were to put in 26 cents they would give you an estimation of how many clicks you would get based on their current number of clicks that other people get, and you can see how much that might cost you over a period of time.

This is a great tool to continue to build out your keyword planning for your website. Another place you can look for keywords or longer tail keywords is in Google itself. A lot of people overlook this. It’s a very simple idea, and is that if you type your word in Google, and you type in “anxiety” here, say we type in “anxiety”, and I click on “anxiety”. It’s going to give me a list (at the bottom of search page) of here’s the top ranking content for “anxiety”, and again some of these Psychology Today, and NIMH.

I’m not going to be able to compete with these probably to get to the top, say anxiety center, to get to the top of page one for the word “anxiety”. But if you go to the bottom of the page, you’ll see searches related to anxiety, so this is another great place to find related longer tail keywords. These are keywords that synonymously Google in some cases will return as part of a search on “anxiety”. So, “what is an anxiety attack”, “anxiety depression”, “what is anxiety disorder”. You can see these are much longer tail keywords. I’m actually going to take “what is an anxiety disorder” and put that in my Keyword Planner.

We’re going to see what we come back with here. This gets a good number of searches. Wow. It’s interesting. For this topic, it’s almost as if people are spending more for the longer tail keywords than they are the more topic-related keywords. I guess that’s because they are able to even get found, to get shown for this, but I’m kind of surprised. It still says low. It’s only got 1,000 monthly searches, and maybe this is more specific. S0 if I’m a psychiatrist, this would be a great phrase to drive people to my website and/or my business.

Certainly it would be worth 86 cents a click for a psychiatrist to bid on this keyword. For somebody who’s just producing information, or a blog, or something like that, or selling products I’m not sure 86 cents a click would be worth it, but I’m kind of surprised by that. It does get a very good number of searches. Again, this is English only. It is worldwide, but in July alone it got six million searches. Actually, I’m sorry. This list of words that is shown as related keywords got a total of six million searches.

This long tail keyword phrase only got 1,000. This is the cumulative total of the keywords down here, but again the idea here is to get more ideas. “Post-traumatic stress disorder”, that could be one. Here’s one, “signs of anxiety”, 37 cents. A fairly low bid price, low, 165,000. I’m sorry, yeah 37 cents, 40,500 views. I would be happy with a page that ranked for this keyword that got 40,500 page searches a month where I’m on the top of the results.

This is how you can use the Google Keyword Planner, and Google itself to expand your keyword list to more longer tail keywords within a trend. This will really help drive traffic to your website by not trying to rank for top-level or topic-related keywords like “anxiety”, and trying to rank for keywords that your site has a much greater chance of getting ranked somewhere on the first page or few pages to get traffic.

That’s it for this episode. This is Digital Dave signing off, and we will see you in the next episode. Thank you.