Any marketeer in the world who wants to grow their business is aware of the Google Keyword Planner tool provided by the tech giant Google. It was earlier called Google Keyword Tool. Millions of people around the world use google and they have a vast audience. People use Google to decide what to wear, where to go, and most importantly what to buy. It allows you to be seen by customers via well-timed ads from the moment they start searching for the things you or your business offers. It does not matter whether the ads appear on a mobile or on a desktop, as long as the customer finds the ad relevant to their search. Although most of us have heard of it, not many of us actually know how to use google keyword planner to bring in ideal customers.
The Google Keyword Planner provides a host of services, such as :
- Increasing Website Traffic
It allows you to drive online sales, bookings, or mailing list signups via their ads.
- Increasing the number of phone calls:
The number of customer calls are sure to increase with ads that provide your phone number and a click to call button.
- Increase shop visits
Via their well-placed business ads that provide the Google map facility, you will find more customers at your door interested in buying what you provide.
The Google Keyword Planner tool has a bad reputation since Google removed the feature to see a concrete monthly search volume. The data now seems to appear very vague and shows an unclear range, that does not help in customer analysis. You can get this feature back if you run an AdWords campaign but that costs a lot of money and not everyone has that kind of advertising budget.
Many people have advised to stop using Google Keyword Planner because of the above reasons. However, this should not stop you from capitalizing on the Google Keyword Planner because it still has some amazing features which can be capitalized by SEOs.
Through this article, we will look into how to use Google Keyword Planner efficiently. I will also provide some amazing hacks that will help you in getting back the exact search volumes.
So let’s get started.
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How to unlock exact Key search volumes.
Google is extremely reluctant to show exact Key search volumes and this is one of the main reasons many seasoned SEO managers have boycotted the tool. Let’s understand this better with an example. If you take a look at two keywords (SEO services and SEO consultants) on the Google planner tool, you will see that it provides a range of the search volumes i.e 10K – 100K instead of an exact number.
However, if you search the same keywords on Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, you will notice that the ‘SEO services’ keyword gets more traction than the other.
I will show you two ways how you can do that.
Method 1 – For max CPC analyze the estimated expressions.
You can start by manually adding a ton of keywords in the “Get search volumes and metrics” tool. You can also check the keyword ideas view, which provides similar suggestions and include them in your plan. Be alert and select the “exact match” option when it is prompted.
Now go to the keywords view and in their drop-down menu, keep the max CPC target as high as it can go. Now if you see the impressions column, you will get an estimation of the number of impressions your particular ad will get in that particular month if you use those specific keywords.
Since you have kept the max CPC target as very high, the real monthly search volumes will be very near to the exact monthly search volumes shown in Ahrefs keyword explorer.
It is just one of the many ways of gauging search volumes and is in no way definitive.
Method 2. Install Keywords Everywhere
Keywords everywhere is one of the many Chrome extensions that Google provides. It adds CPC and search volume to all the sites that you use such as YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc. It is also available on Firefox which is an added benefit.
Although it adds a lot to the search volumes, extracting this data is very hard. You can use XPath Code and the Scraper Chrome Extension to export this data. Although the data is not definite but it is a lot better than the data you would get by normally using the Google Keyword Planner tool.
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Adding Keyword ideas for ten terms all at once to the Keyword Planner tool.
Anyone who has been a regular user of the Google Keyword Planner tool knows that you cannot add more than ten keyword ideas. However, I will provide you a way to get past that hurdle.
The solution is very simple. You just need to add these multiple keywords one by one and not all at once. You can add these keywords in your plan by selecting thé option of “select all ” in the checkbox and then “add to plan”.
So if you want to add all the 743 suggestions of the keyword SEO, you just “select all 743” and “add to plan”. And voila it is done. It was not a hassle at all.
Under keywords, you will find the historical metrics tab. You just need to click on it and you will see that all 743 suggestions have been added to your plan. They have also been de-duped in order to remove identical keywords. The list appears in alphabetical order by default, but you can change it according to your needs.
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Take inspiration from the keyword ideas provided by your competitors.
As you know Google Keyword Planner has the ability to generate suggestions for keywords using only a URL.
So what you can do is go ahead and copy their URLs, paste in and select “Entire site” from the provided drop-down.
You might end up finding a couple of keyword suggestions, pertaining to their brand. You can just use the filter to leave them out.
Filter > keyword text > brand name
You can also choose the “this page option” if you are interested in searching for keywords for a particular blog post or social media page.
Some might call it stealing, but at the end of the day, it is more like spying on your competitors to get your hands on some good keyword suggestions.
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Look for the questions that the public is asking.
Any SEO person or marketeer is interested in knowing what kind of questions the audience is asking. This allows them to gauge the market reaction and try to shape their services to the needs of the audience. Tools like Free keyword search and Answer the public is widely used by everyone for this purpose.
However, instead of using a separate tool for this, you can tune the keyword planner to perform the same functions.
In the checkbox, you need to filter the keyword and enter any one of the following: what, why, who, when, how, where.
Filter > keyword text > contains > [who,what why, when, how, where]
You need to do this for all the 6 suppositions, after which you will get an elaborate number of suggestions for these questions. You can also filter out these questions based on the needs of your search. I would advise you to create an ad group for these questions. It will become a lot easier to export these questions into an Excel file or a Google Sheets file if you want to.
If we still consider the keyword “SEO”, then some of the questions that might be added to your plan will be as follows:
- What is SEO?
- How many SEO tools are there? etc
The Ahrefs Keywords Explore also provided the same results when the seed keyword ‘SEO’ was searched.
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Use Page Bid to look for meaningful keywords.
Google Keyword suggestions are very helpful but the efficiency is lost when you end up filtering out the suggestions that are not important to your business. It takes a whole lot of time. It gets irritating when you realize you have to remove hundreds and thousands of keywords manually.
So what to do? I recommend you make the use of the “Top of page bid (high range)” column. But what is that? Google’s definition is that it displays the” higher range of what advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top of page bid.” It depends on the location and the settings. It is very similar to AdWords, but it is very beneficial.
This data shows that if advertisers are up for bidding on a particular keyword, it means that they have had good sales from that keyword. Any Keyword, that can convert cold leads to sales, is worth looking into and adding to your plans. You should always sort the keywords from high to low in order to understand which keyword has the highest demand. You can do this by sorting the column header. One bonus tip is to sort the data in ascending order to find informational search terms for blog posts or social media pages. Another pro tip would be to search for the keyword on Google and have a look at the businesses that are using those keywords to advertise their products.
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Modify your search volume ranges to the city level while targeting nearby localities.
You have realized by now that the maximum of Google Keyword searches are not capable of telling you the number of people searching for that particular term in that locality, state, or area. You can only view search volumes for an entire country. This kind of data is vague and does not provide proper marketing strategies to the local SEO.
Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
Let’s take an example of a Google keyword like a plumber.
Let’s begin by employing the first hack i.e using impressions. By doing this you will get an approximate number of thirty thousand impressions in thirty days. However, this data is on a pan-US basis. Now if you add a Los Angeles location filter you will know that around 12k people have searched for the word plumber.
You can also use this method to understand what are locations that have the maximum number of searches for the keyword.
So if you want to search for a word like “Henderson’s relish”, you can select all the locations on the Plan Overview section. You will know that Henderson’s relish is searched mostly in the United Kingdom. Now if you want to look further into this, you should add the UK in the location option and the results will be more localized. So you just need to do this repeatedly to really understand which state, city or county has the maximum number of searches.
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Understand what devices are being used by the public.
This will allow you to optimize your site according to the different devices customers use to browse the web.
Conclusion
Although the Google Keyword Planner has its disadvantages, but it has many features that can be used to optimize your searches.
You can combine Ahrefs Keyword Planner to Google Keyword Planner to get exact search volumes and more.
So go ahead and use these tips to get some valuable insights.
