Keyword Planner is free with any Google Ads account, and it's a free keyword research tool that comes with every Google Ads account. It's also easy to misuse. Give it your website and it hands back hundreds of ideas in seconds, sorted by search volume, with prices attached. The temptation is to take the biggest numbers and build the account around them.
We gave Keyword Planner the websites of the 12 small businesses in this guide, and it misread every one of them. This chapter shows what it got wrong, where to seed it instead, and how to turn a list of 1,400 ideas into a handful of tight ad groups.
Keyword Planner Reads the Words on Your Website, Not What You Actually Sell.
The tool's website option does what Google says it does: "Enter any website and Google will look for keywords related to the content on that site." The key word is content. The tool reads the words on your pages. It doesn't know what you actually sell.
We seeded it with the website of each of the 12 businesses, set to each one's metro area, or the whole US for businesses that sell nationally. All 12 came back with off-target ideas among their biggest suggestions.
The clearest case was a small online store that sells hand-poured soy candles, wax melts and reed diffusers. Among its top six ideas, Google suggested "candle warmers," at about 135,000 searches a month, and "wax warmer," at about 27,100. The store sells no warmers. We checked its full product list: 58 products, and not one warmer.
A store that bid on "candle warmers" would pay for 135,000 people a month looking for a product it can't sell them. So the step that matters most happens with your own eyes, not in the tool: every suggestion gets read by a person before it joins an ad group.
Keyword Planner Handed a Bookkeeper for Vets "Vets Near Me." Pet Owners Don't Hire Accountants.
Professional services got stranger results. One business in the sample is a CPA and bookkeeping firm that works with veterinary practices. Seeded with its veterinary page, Keyword Planner's biggest idea in its home metro was "vets near me," about 5,400 searches a month. Those are pet owners looking for a vet, not vet clinic owners looking for an accountant.
A business consultant's site came back with "consulting jobs" (about 9,900 searches a month) and "consultant salary" (about 3,600): people who want to become consultants, not hire one. An online reading tutor's site returned "high school," at about 550,000 searches a month, a search that isn't looking for a tutor.
Reading every idea also turns up the good ones hiding next to the bad. The tutor's list that offered "high school" also offered "tutors for high school students," about 880 searches a month. The tutor works with grades 1 through 12, so that one is a keeper. One word apart, one idea is a waste and the other is a customer.
None of this is the businesses' fault. A site written for clients is full of words that also describe the client's own customers, the job market or the school system. Keyword Planner doesn't sort them out for you. You have to.
A Competitor's Website Holds a Free Keyword List. Keyword Planner Will Read It for You.
Your own site is one seed. The one our method starts with is the site of a competitor already advertising on the searches you want.
Start by finding them. Every Google Ads account comes with a free Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. Google built it to check your own ads, but it shows a real results page for any search you type, and per Google, using it adds no ad impressions. Type the two or three searches you most want to show up for and note who's advertising. Resist tapping their ads to look around. You'd be spending a competitor's money to learn what the preview already showed you.
Then give Keyword Planner that competitor's page, the one built for the service you both sell, and set the location to your market. Keyword Planner lets you narrow ideas by country, region or city. What comes back is a view of the searches their site is built around, with volumes for your area.
The location setting changes everything. Same page, two settings: across the whole US, "vets near me" showed about 1,000,000 monthly searches; in the firm's own metro, about 5,400. A local business reading national numbers will think its market is enormous and its budget is tiny. Set the location to the area you actually serve, every time, before you read a single volume.
Two kinds of results need special handling. Competitor names will come back, especially for well-known chains; those go on your negative keyword list, so you don't pay for people looking for someone else. And your own business name belongs in a campaign of its own, separate from the rest, as Chapter 2 described.
One CPA's Website Gave Keyword Planner a Single Idea. Its Service Page Gave 704.
Which page you seed matters as much as whose. When we gave Keyword Planner the CPA firm's whole website, it returned exactly one idea. When we gave it the firm's veterinary accounting page, the same tool returned 704.
Google's help page hints at one reason: to get ideas from a whole website, not just the page you entered, the site has to be added and verified. Whatever the cause, the fix is the same. Seed the tool with the specific page each ad group will send people to, the pages Chapter 4 asked you to build. Each seed returns ideas about one service, which is exactly what one ad group needs.
Do the same with your own site even if you plan to rely on competitors. It's the fastest way to see your website through Google's eyes. If Keyword Planner can't tell what a page is about, a searcher landing on it may not be able to either. When the top ideas for your own service page are about something you don't offer, treat that as a note on the page, not just the keyword list: say plainly, near the top, what you do, for whom and where, then run the page through the tool again.
Five or Six Keywords Are Enough for One Ad Group on a Small Budget.
Once you've read the list, sort the keepers into themes, one theme per page. Start with two or three keywords per ad group, as Chapter 4 suggested, and let a group grow to five or six as you find close relatives worth adding. For the candle store, one soy candle ad group might hold:
- soy candles (about 18,100 searches a month)
- soy wax candles (33,100)
- hand poured candles (4,400)
- hand poured soy candles (1,900)
- scented soy candles (1,000)
- natural soy candles (480)
Six keywords, one theme, one page. Notice what's missing: candle-making supplies, warmers and every other company's brand name. Each one either gets its own group or stays out. Wax melts get their own group. Reed diffusers get their own. The 1,467 ideas Keyword Planner returned for the store shrink to a few groups like this, and that's the point.
These keywords go live on exact match at launch, so each one shows your ad only for that search and close versions of it. Chapter 6 explains why phrase and broad match wait.
Treat the price range beside each idea as history, not a quote. Google pegs the low end near the 20th percentile and the high end near the 80th of past top-of-page bids. Use it to plan, as Chapter 3 did, and let your own account's real click prices replace it within a few weeks.
People Searching for Jobs, Salaries or How-To Videos Won't Hire You. Keep Them Out of the Account.
As you read, you'll find the same kinds of off-target ideas in almost every list. In our sample they included:
- Jobs and careers: "consulting jobs," "consultant salary," "veterinarian career." The consultant's list also offered "boston consulting careers," about 5,400 a month: a job search that also names someone else's firm, so it fails twice.
- How-to and do-it-yourself searches: "candles make," about 22,200 searches a month on the candle store's list.
- Products or services you don't sell: "candle warmers."
- Bargain hunters: searches with "free" or "cheap" in them, unless free is what you offer.
- Competitors' names.
Leave them out of your ad groups, and start a negative keyword list with the obvious ones now. On exact match, a few negatives go a long way. The list matters far more later, once the account earns its way to broad match (Chapter 7), and it's never finished: from then on, it grows every time you read your search terms report.
Next: Phrase Match Shows Ads on Searches That Only Hint at Your Keyword.
You now have tight ad groups with five or six keywords each. How tightly Google is allowed to match those keywords to real searches is Chapter 6's subject, along with why a small budget begins on exact match.
Every chapter so far, from tracking to budget, landing pages and keyword research, is on the guide's home page.
When we take on an account through Google Ads management, keyword research starts with the competitors already bidding in the client's market, and every idea gets read by a person before it goes live. Doing it yourself? Seed Keyword Planner with your best service page tonight, read the top 50 ideas, and count how many you'd actually want to pay for. Then do the same with the service page of the competitor whose ad you see most often.
