How To Use Google Keyword Planner For SEO (Tutorial)

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Google Keyword Planner to perform keyword research for SEO purposes.

What is Google Keyword Planner?

Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool from Google, designed primarily for advertisers running Google Ads. However, it’s also a powerful resource for SEO professionals looking to find relevant keywords, understand user search behavior, and plan content strategies effectively.

Step 1: Create a Free Google Keyword Planner Account

You must create a free Google Ads account to use Google Keywords Planner.

Open a new browser window and navigate to Google Keyword Planner.

Click "Visit Keyword Planner".

You’ll be prompted to log in to an existing Google Ads account. If you don’t have an account, click “New Google Ads Account”.

Follow the prompts to fill in your first name, last name, and email address, choose your password, and click “Next.”

You’ll be sent a confirmation code to verify your email address.

Next, you’ll be asked for some additional information about your account, like Phone (optional), Date of Birth, and Gender.

Next, you’ll be prompted to accept the Google Terms of Service and create your account.

As a final step, you must choose your Billing Country, Time Zone, and Currency.

Although you won’t be charged anything, Google requires this info if you need to activate campaigns in your Google Ads account.

When you’re ready to proceed, click the “Submit” button.

That’s it. You’ve just created a new Google Keyword Planner and Google Ads account!

Step 2: Find New Keywords Ideas

Now that your account is set up and ready to use, you can start using Google Keyword Planner's keyword research tools.

There are two tools you can use:

• Discover new keywords
• Get search volume and forecasts

Let’s start by clicking the “Discover New Keywords” option.

With the ‘Discover new keywords’ tool, you can find ideas based on broad terms or keywords related to a specific website or page.

You can filter the results by country and language, export them to an Excel or Google sheet, or add them to your plan.

Let’s first examine how to use the ‘Start with Keywords’ feature. Here is an overview of the process:

1. Think of a broad topic for which you want to get keyword ideas.
2. Type high-level keywords into the search box.
3. Set your region and language.
4. Use filters to find both seed keywords and long-tail keywords for your blog posts and digital marketing campaigns.

To make things easier for you, let me show you an example of using Google Keyword Planner to do keyword research for your blog.

It’s the same process I’m using to find new SEO Keywords to target in my blog.

Start by adding keywords representing your chosen topic. Don’t go too specific or too broad. In my case, I’ve added keywords related to the SEO niche.

Note: You can only enter 10 Keywords at a time. To add more keywords, you must finish this research and select which keywords to add to your plan. Then, you can repeat the process to add more keywords or use the ‘Get search volume and forecasts’ option, as we’ll see later.

Once you click “Get Results”, you’ll be presented with a list of keywords with additional information:

A few things to note while viewing the results:

You can click on any column name (“Keyword (by relevance),” “Avg. monthly searches,” “Competition,” etc.) to sort the data in ascending or descending order.

The “Competition” column refers to the competitiveness of ad placement for a keyword, NOT to how easy it is to rank for this keyword in organic search.

This differs from the keyword difficulty metric in other tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. So, for SEO purposes, you can ignore this column.

The “Top of page bid (low range) and “Top of page bid (high range)” columns show how much you will pay per click if you target the particular keyword in your paid ads. While this is primarily for PPC campaigns, as you’ll see below (Step 3), it can also be used for SEO.

The ‘Average Monthly Searches' column shows the monthly search volume for a particular keyword. This data is based on historical data coming from Google. You’ll notice that the “Average Monthly Searches” column shows a range and not the exact search volume for the particular keywords. We’ll see later how to find a more accurate number.

Step 3: Exclude Brand Related Searches

While viewing the results, you can click the “Refine Keywords” option to exclude specific categories of keywords from your list.

This is particularly useful if you want to remove keywords related to known brands like Google, competitor keywords, or even keywords that are no longer valid, such as keywords that reference a period in the past.

To do that, click the “Refine Keywords” button and navigate the list. Uncheck the box for the keywords you want to exclude.

Step 4: Choose Keywords For Your SEO Campaigns

After excluding brand-related and other keywords, you can start selecting keywords for your SEO campaigns.

Here are a few tips to help you with your decision:

Sort the keywords by clicking the “Top of Page Bid (High range)” column.

The “Top of Page Bid (High range)” column shows how much advertisers are willing to pay to secure a top position for their ads in the Google Search Results.

How is this related to SEO? If advertisers pay a lot for a keyword, it means it has more value to them, i.e., it can generate many conversions.

These are great keywords to target with SEO content because you know in advance that a top organic ranking for such a keyword will generate sales and conversions for your business ‘free of charge’.

For now, choose broad keywords highly related to your website and business and proceed to the next steps.

Step 5: Find Long-Tail Keywords

Unlike other keyword research tools, the Google Keyword Tool does not allow you to filter the results by the number of words. This is a useful feature in other tools that makes it easy to find long-tail keywords highly relevant to your target keyword and easier to rank for.

You can follow this nice trick with Google Keyword Planner.

Long-tail keywords usually start with the words “best, top, what, how, who, where, why”. So, by creating a filter and adding those words, you can get a list of long-tail keywords.

To do this, click the “ADD FILTER” button and select “KEYWORD”. Type one of the above keywords and click APPLY.

You’ll see now that the results show you long-tail keywords not shown before. You can add multiple filters to get more results.

Sort the above table using the “Top of Page Bid (High range)” column, and you’ll find some extremely valuable long-tail keywords to use in your blog posts.

Step 6: Analyze Keywords

I mentioned above that Google Keyword Planner's disadvantage compared to other keyword research tools is that it doesn’t show the exact monthly search volume of keywords but a range.

To get the exact search volume in Google Keyword Planner, move the mouse over the "Avg. monthly searches" column to get monthly data.

You can also click the "Download Keyword Ideas" button to export the data in Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV and see the monthly search volume in columns.

Step 7: Check Your Competitor's Keywords

Another great feature of Google Keyword Tool is the “Start with a Website”. When selecting this option from the “Discover New Ideas” tool, you can get keyword ideas based on your own website or a competitor’s website.

Let’s see how this is done.

Select “Keyword Planner” from the left menu, "Discover New Keywords," and then “Start with a Website”.

Enter a domain or page URL and click GET RESULTS.

For example, to find keywords related to a website, you can enter the website’s domain in the search box, select “Use the Entire Site,” and click “Get Results”.

Next, you can add some filters to EXCLUDE brand-related keywords and search terms that are not relevant.

To find unique keywords that are not known to you, filter the results to “Exclude” keywords already in your plan.

Step 8: Perform Bulk Keyword Analysis

Another nice feature of Google Keyword Planner is the “Get search volume and forecasts” tool. To open it, click “Get search volume and forecasts” from the main menu.

Note: If you have the keyword plan open from the previous step, click the “X” button at the top left to close it and return to the first screen.

The “Get search volume and forecasts” tool does two things:

1. It allows you to see the search volume of several keywords at once. You can either type your words (one per line) or upload a list of keywords using a file. This lifts the limitation of 10 keywords at a time when using the “Discover new keywords” tool.
2. It gives you a prediction (forecast) on how the keywords might perform in the future.

To get started, type a few keywords in the provided search box and click “Get Started”.

The results will appear in the same view as before, and you can use all the tips to filter the data and find which keywords to add to your projects.

Step 9: Find Local SEO Keywords

A unique feature of the Google Keyword Planner that can prove very useful for local online marketing is the ‘location’ filters available at every step of the keyword research process.

The ‘location’ filter lets you see keyword data related to a particular country, city, or even postcodes.

Here is an example:

Let’s say you want to find out what people search for related to “Italian restaurants” in a particular city.

You can start with the ‘Discover New Keywords” tool by entering the “Italian Restaurants” keyword and then selecting a city from the location option.

Click “Get Results”, select the keywords, and add them to a new plan.

Select the "Breakdown by Locations" option by clicking the 'Charts' icon (on the top right of the graph).

You can then use the left dropdown to drill down by Region, State, City, etc.

Step 10: Export Your Keywords To Excel

Every time you perform keyword research and add keywords to a Plan, this is saved in DRAFT mode in your account.

When you log in again to Google Keyword Planner, you can select one of your draft plans and continue working.

You can optionally export your keyword list in a .CSV file to use with Excel or directly to a Google Sheets file. You can do this by clicking the “Download Keywords Ideas" button at any research stage.

Video Tutorial

Key Learnings

The Google Keyword Planner is a powerful tool with many great options. It’s free, and the data comes directly from Google, which makes it a reliable source of information.

It doesn’t have all the features of other professional paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush it’s a tool that every digital marketing professional should know how to use.

As you have read in this tutorial, once you get an idea of how it works, it’s easy to navigate around and perform keyword research for SEO and PPC campaigns.