Give Google's Keyword Planner a school's website and it hands back hundreds of keyword ideas in a few seconds. It looks like a finished list. It isn't.
When we gave Keyword Planner the websites of our twelve example schools, it returned ideas for patients, salon customers, truck drivers looking for jobs and teenagers studying for a car permit, mixed in with the searches families actually type when choosing a school. This chapter shows where those ideas come from, how to get a better list from the start, and why every idea needs a person to read it before it goes anywhere near a school's account.
Keyword Planner Mixes a School's Clinic, Salon and Job Pages Into Its Ideas. One University Got 724 Medical Searches.
Keyword Planner builds ideas from whatever is on the site you give it. A school site holds far more than admissions: a health system, a campus salon open to the public, faculty job openings, the statement of faith, the curriculum, the athletics schedule. All of it becomes keyword ideas.
Our example market is Salt Lake City, and the twelve schools are three private K-12 schools, three colleges, three trade schools and three online programs, all advertising on Google. Your market's numbers will be different. The way you build the list won't. We seeded Keyword Planner with each school's whole site, set to the Salt Lake City market, and read every idea. At nine of the twelve schools, more than one idea in ten had nothing to do with enrolling a student. What it mixed in:
- A public university's medical center. All 725 ideas from the university's site missed; 724 were health-care searches like knee replacement surgery. Not one mentioned a degree, admission or tuition.
- A beauty school's salon floor. About 1,000 of its ideas were customers looking for services, like "eyelash extensions near me."
- A CDL school's driving tests. Its ten highest-volume ideas were permit tests for ordinary car licenses, and about 170 more were trucking job searches.
- A Christian school's doctrine pages. Close to 100 ideas were about the Sabbath.
- An independent school's job and curriculum pages. Teacher job searches and classroom curriculum content.
The two lowest off-target shares came from an online university (6%) and a community college (4%), though most of the community college's ideas were searches for a single course rather than a spread of its programs. Clean is relative: the online university's 6% off-target still meant 86 ideas a person had to catch. The tool isn't broken. It reads the whole site, and a school's site talks to many audiences besides future students.
Those stray ideas aren't cheap, either. The single most expensive idea on the university's list was "tummy tuck salt lake city," at up to $27.73 a click for the top of the page. A school that pasted the list into an account without reading it would be bidding against plastic surgeons for patients it can't serve.
Keyword Planner Learns More From a Rival's Program Page Than Your Whole Site. One School's Site Gave It Three Ideas.
A better list starts with a better seed. First, find out who is advertising on the searches you care about in your market. The safe way to look is a tool already in your account: Ad Preview and Diagnosis. Enter "private schools near me" or "welding school," choose your city, and the live ads appear the way a parent there would see them. Google's help page says checking this way leaves your impression data alone. Don't check a competitor by clicking its ad. It costs them a click, it can skew their data, and the preview already shows you everything the ad says.
Then give Keyword Planner one program page at a time from those schools, with the location set to your market: a rival's nursing page, a rival's lower school admissions page, a rival's welding program. A single focused page produces ideas about that one program. Do the same with your own program pages, one at a time, to see your site the way Google reads it.
Whole sites can mislead in the other direction too. One small private school's whole-site seed returned just three ideas; the same school's home page alone returned 625. Keyword Planner's help page ties ideas from a whole website, rather than the one page you typed in, to verifying that site in Google Search Console. Whatever the tool returns for a whole site, a single program page gives a more focused list, for a rival's site and for your own.
The steps are short. In Keyword Planner, choose to discover new keywords, switch to starting from a website, paste one program page and tell the tool to use only that page. Set the location to the area you enroll from and the language to English. Google also notes that pairing a seed keyword with the URL can return more ideas than the URL alone, so add the program's plain name, like "welding school," in the keyword box.
For online programs that recruit nationally, the location setting changes the volumes, not the ideas. We ran one online university's site at both the Salt Lake City market and the whole US: the two lists held exactly the same 1,528 ideas, with different numbers beside them. Set the location to wherever you'll actually advertise, so the volumes and bid ranges match the auction you're entering.
A Person Reads Every Keyword Planner Idea Before It Touches a School's Account. Google Can't Tell a Parent From a Patient.
Every idea goes into one of four places:
- A program ad group. The idea names a program, grade level or campus you offer, in words a family would use. It goes into that program's ad group, which holds about five or six closely related keywords (Chapter 4).
- The brand campaign. Searches for your school's own name get their own campaign, launched alongside everything else, so they never share a budget with strangers.
- The negative list. Searches you never want to pay for. For schools, the usual ones are job searches ("teacher jobs," "trucking jobs"), current-student searches (login, portal, calendar, transcript), services sold on campus (the clinic, the salon), curriculum and homework content, and "free" when you don't offer anything free.
- The trash. Ideas that are simply irrelevant and unlikely to come back.
The negative list looks different by school type. A private K-12 school blocks teacher and coach job searches, "public school" district searches and homework help. A college blocks the student portal, financial aid login, transcript requests, athletics tickets and faculty jobs. A trade school blocks job listings for the trade itself ("welding jobs," "CDL jobs"), license test practice and tool shopping. An online program blocks "free online courses" and other schools' brand names. Keep these in a shared negative list so every campaign uses the same one.
Competing schools' names deserve a special word. Seeding Keyword Planner with a rival's pages brings their name back as an idea, and once broad match is running (Chapter 7) it brings far more of them through the search terms report. Put them on the negative list. A separate campaign aimed at a rival's name is a deliberate decision for much later, if ever, never something that slips in through a keyword list.
Reading a few hundred ideas takes an afternoon. Paying for a few hundred clicks from patients and job seekers takes much longer to notice.
Phrases From a School's Brochure Often Have No Searches at All. Families Use Plainer Words Than Schools Do.
Schools describe themselves in their own language: experiential learning, whole-child education, academic pathways. Families search in theirs: private school near me, Montessori preschool, welding school, online nursing degree. A Catholic school family types "Catholic school," not the school's mission statement. An adult changing careers types "medical assistant program," not the name of the pathway on the college's catalog page.
In one private school account we built, we took 50 to 60 phrases straight from the school's website and ran them through Keyword Planner. Most of them had zero search volume. They were accurate descriptions of the school, and nobody typed them. The phrases with real searches were mostly the plainer ones, so we built the account around the type of school, the grade level and the place.
So check volume before building an ad group around a phrase. A keyword with no searches won't hurt you, but an ad group full of them won't show, and a campaign built on them will look broken when it's simply quiet.
Two more readings matter. Keyword Planner shows a monthly average, so check the month-by-month trend for programs with a season, like summer camps or spring start dates. And its top-of-page bid range isn't a price. Google describes the low and high ends as approximations of the 20th and 80th percentile of what advertisers have paid. In our experience, treat the band as a rough guide and expect your real costs to move once ads are running.
Keyword research isn't a one-time job either. The list you build before launch covers the searches you can predict. Once ads run, the search terms report shows the exact words families typed before clicking, and it surfaces both new keywords for your program ad groups and new negatives. While the account runs on exact match, a weekly read is enough; when broad match starts (Chapter 7), read it daily for the first 30 days. Many of the best keywords in a school account that has run for a year come from that report, not from the first research session.
Next: Families Searching a Program Name and "Near Me" Come First
In Chapter 6, the finished list meets the launch: the first searches to go live are the ones naming a program and a place. If you haven't structured your ad groups yet, Chapter 4 explains one program per group and per page. All sixteen chapters are listed on the Google Ads for Education guide home. If you'd like a hand with the first list, here is how our Google Ads management runs for schools.
