Keyword Planner is the free tool inside Google Ads that suggests keywords and shows how often each one is searched. The quickest way to use it is to hand it your website and let it read. For a local business, that shortcut often goes wrong, and it goes wrong in ways that cost money if nobody reads the list.
For this guide we fed Keyword Planner the 12 websites in our St. Louis area sample, one at a time, plus two more electricians from the same city, always with St. Louis set as the market. Some lists came back close to what the business sells. Others came back describing a different business entirely. Every list needed cleaning before a single keyword was fit to buy.
Chapter 4 showed that Google rewards an ad and a page that match the search. This chapter is about choosing the searches in the first place.
Keyword Planner Reads Your Website Literally. One Electrician Got 696 Generator Ideas Out of 730.
Google describes the website option plainly: enter a site, and Keyword Planner "will look for keywords related to the content on that site." In our pulls, it leaned toward whatever the site talks about most.
One electrician in our sample does residential, commercial and solar work, and installs whole-house generators among other things. Keyword Planner returned 730 ideas with search volume for its site. 696 of them were about generators. The top idea was simply "generator," about 2,400 St. Louis searches a month, and advertisers' top-of-page bids for it ran from 29 cents to $5.40. Not one of the 730 ideas named St. Louis or a nearby town.
Generators are a real service for this business, so the list isn't wrong about what's on the site. It's wrong about who is searching. "Portable home generators" and "electric generator" are people shopping for a product, and the low bids reflect it. Hardly any of it came from someone trying to hire an electrician: searches like "generator installers near me" showed about 10 a month.
The electrician wasn't the only one. A landscaping company in the sample advertises design-build and hardscape work, and its biggest searches came back as lawn care.
Your Own Website Can Hide "Electricians Near Me" From Keyword Planner. A Rival's Website Can Show It.
To see whether the generator list was a fluke, we ran two more St. Louis electricians' websites through Keyword Planner, set to the same market.
The second site came back as electric car shopping. Its top idea was "electric vehicle charging stations," about 5,400 searches a month, followed by "electric vehicle" and "electric car." The company installs home chargers, but the people behind those searches are mostly looking for a place to charge or a car to buy.
The third site produced the list a local electrician actually needs, though its second-biggest idea was another electrician's name. Its top idea was "electricians near me," about 3,600 searches a month, with "electrician st louis" at about 590. Top-of-page bids for those two ran as high as about $61 and $55, against about $4 for the electric car searches, a sign advertisers find them worth paying for.
Our electricians guide found a related version of this problem, where electricians' sites filled Keyword Planner with plumbing and HVAC searches. The fix is the same in both cases: give Keyword Planner more to read. Start with your own site, then run the sites of three or four competitors who do the same work in your area, and add a few plain service words of your own, like "electrician" and "panel upgrade." Google notes that a keyword and a website together can produce more ideas than a website alone. Set the location to your market every time, or the volumes describe the whole country.
Keyword Planner's Suggestions Mix In Rival Company Names, Your Own Name and Towns Two Hours Away.
A raw list is not a keyword list. Every one we pulled carried lines that no local business should buy as they stand:
- Other companies' names. A pest control company's list included a competitor's name at about 2,400 searches a month. The gym's list was the extreme: 1,020 of its 1,811 ideas were searches for another gym chain.
- The business's own name. The cleaning company's list included searches for its own name, about 720 a month. Those belong somewhere else, covered below.
- Towns outside the service area. The electrician's list included generator searches for Houston, Atlanta and Nashville. The cleaning company's list included maid services in Chicago, with no St. Louis searches behind them. The roofer's list included roofing in Columbia, Missouri, about two hours west, while the Columbia it actually serves is Columbia, Illinois, across the river.
- Products instead of services. The generator and electric car searches above.
The numbers need the same care as the words. Keyword Planner rolls close variants together and reports one figure for the group. On the plumber's list, "plumbers near me" and "plumbers closest to me" both show about 9,900 searches a month with identical bid ranges. That isn't 19,800 searches. It's one group of searches counted once and printed twice. Adding up a raw list overstates the demand.
The opposite happens too. As Chapter 4 found, "kirkwood plumber" and "plumber kirkwood mo" came back as separate groups with very different numbers, about 590 and about 70. A town or service that looks small under one wording can be large under another. Before you drop a service as too small to bother with, check two or three ways of saying it.
And treat every number as an estimate, not a count. Google says campaign performance depends on factors such as your bid, budget and ad quality, and the monthly figures in our pulls are averages across the past 12 months. They are good for comparing one search with another. They are not a promise of how many people will see your ad.
Read every line. Cut the ones you don't sell and the places you don't work. The out-of-area towns and the product words are worth more than deleting: added as negative keywords, they keep a broad keyword from matching those searches later. Building the full negative list from real search terms comes in a later chapter.
Drain Cleaning and Water Heater Keywords Belong in Separate Ad Groups, Each With Its Own Ad.
Once the list is clean, sort it. Google's own advice is to group keywords and ads into ad groups by theme, so the person searching for one thing doesn't see an ad about another. For a local business, the theme is the service.
The plumber's list in our sample sorts into four groups without much effort:
- Emergency: "plumber emergency near me," about 1,300 searches a month, and "emergency plumbers," about 480.
- Water heaters: "water heater repair," about 720, and "water heater service," about 90.
- Sewer lines: "sewer line repair near me," about 1,000. The sewer ideas also included another company's name, which gets cut.
- Drain cleaning: almost nothing. The plumber's site produced few drain searches, none above 40 a month and many of them other plumbers' names, even though drain clearing headlines its coupons.
That last gap is the point of the section above. A list built from one website can miss a service the business sells and advertises. Drain cleaning searches come from running competitors' sites and your own service words through the tool, then they get an ad group of their own.
From there, the water heater searches see a water heater ad and land on the water heater page. That is the three-way fit from Chapter 4, built in at the keyword stage.
Searches for Your Own Name Flatter Any Campaign They Sit In, So They Get a Campaign of Their Own.
People who search for your company by name were already looking for you, so they tend to call more readily than people searching for a service. Put those searches in the same campaign as "water heater repair," and the campaign's numbers look better than the service searches have earned.
Our setup puts the company name in a separate campaign. In the plumbing, roofing or cleaning campaigns, that same name sits on the negative list, which stops a search for the company from being counted as a win for water heaters. That way the service campaigns are judged on the customers they actually find, and the brand campaign covers the people already looking for you.
Practitioners disagree about whether to pay for your own name at all, since many of those people would find you anyway. Our view is that the competitor names above answer the question. People search for local companies by name, and Keyword Planner offers those names to anyone who runs a rival's site through it. If someone else's ad can appear above your name, the brand campaign is how you make sure yours does.
A Town Name in Every Keyword Adds Nothing When Location Targeting Already Covers the Town.
It's tempting to add your town to every keyword: "water heater repair st louis," "emergency plumber st louis." Google's own advice is not to: "Don't include a location if you plan to use location targeting for your ads." Location targeting already shows the ad to people in your area, so the town name adds nothing to who sees it.
We agree for reach. The exception is the town ad groups from Chapter 4. When a town has enough searches of its own, the town keyword is there to match the ad and the page to that town, not to find more people.
How people word a local search, with "near me" or with a town name, gets its own look in the next chapter.
Next: "Near Me" Searches Matched or Beat City-Name Searches in Every Local Trade We Checked.
Chapter 6 compares the two ways people ask Google for a local business, "near me" and the town name, across every kind of local business in this guide, and shows what that means for the keywords you keep.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather have someone build the list, our Google Ads management starts every local account from competitors' sites, not just the client's own.
