Many tools and paid options are at your disposal to search for the keywords to choose so that your website or your blog lands at the top of the sacrosanct first page of the results of your favorite search engine, Google. However, there is a totally free and absolutely flawless method to get an effective and usable keyword list for all your web pages: Google Keyword Planner or the keyword planning tool available on Google Adwords. And since we are absolutely adorable, we provide you with the unstoppable way to use it to get the best out of it!

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As we mentioned in our first article, one of our friends needs our services to create his website dedicated to his new activity: he is a magician in Nantes! Faced with the plethora of online tools, subscriptions or miraculous offers from service providers, we thought it would be particularly useful to guide him to avoid wasting his time... but also his money!
We therefore decided to help him and provide him with free and easy tools to get what any professional wants on Google: a display of his site on the first page thanks to relevant keywords that are highly sought after by Internet users. And in this case, who can tell us better than Google, what its Internet users are looking for in priority? That's why we've advised him, and above all we advise you to use this beautiful tool, Google Keyword Planner, a keyword planning tool available from a Google AdWords account, before you start writing your content.

Generate keyword ideas with the Google Keyword Planner

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Access the Keyword Planner from the Adwords home screen

You will access the Google Keyword Planner tool via the Google Ads platform with your account.

If you don't have a Google Ads account, you can create one from your Gmail address or any other Google account you already have.

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Now that you are logged in to the planning tool, we can use our imaginary friend to help you get the most out of it.

The Google Keyword Planner Home Screen

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Before trying to know the relevance or the necessary cost of an advertisement on Adwords, first, you must have created your website or blog with the right keywords or be able to modify them with the right keywords, it's so much better than leaving bad ones! The method is the same, except that in the case of an existing website, you will be able to know the most searched words of your content by entering in the menu bar the address of your web page.

In the case of our magician in Nantes, he is in the process of creating his website. So we open this first window to answer our questions.

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We enter the heart of the matter!

Several keywords can be indicated as search criteria. Here we enter 'magician'. You can also choose to include brand names in the results and indicate a website to use as a filter to refine the results.

Here is the page filled in for our friend the magician from Nantes :

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A practical example

The case of a magician in Nantes

We have targeted the activity by magician, the category by event entertainment, then the geographical location by Nantes and Pays de Loire. Note that, as far as the location is concerned, you can choose to target either a city, a region or a country (but also one or several languages), the only exclusion is the choice by department.

Abracadabra, here is the result obtained by clicking on get ideas after having filled our page:

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Analyze the keyword ideas

Let's first look at the keyword grid obtained. Google offers us ad group ideas (see tab above the keyword column) or keyword ideas. In our case, it is better to choose "keyword ideas" because there are no plans to create an AdWords campaign for the moment. We obtain a precise assessment of the most performing keywords, therefore the most searched on Google by Internet users of the Loire region in general and Nantes in particular.

You have several information on the keywords found, the monthly search volume, the level of competition as well as the price paid by the advertisers on the keyword in question.

You can also add or remove columns by clicking on the "columns" icon on the top right.

Filtering search results in Google Keyword Planner

As for the graphs at the top of the page, as shown in the image of the first results, they are very useful to see in which period the keyword requested at the beginning of the query "magician" is the most searched. Then in the top banner, you can filter the results by location, language, search networks and period.

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You can be even more precise by adding filters. You can ask for a keyword to contain or not contain a given word, select only or exclude keywords with a low (medium or high) level of competition etc.

By being curious and skilful, you will be able to obtain multiple information on the audience of Internet users to be targeted by your various keywords and consequently, you will be able to create a site or a blog corresponding to the most requested searches in Google.

Get search volume, bidding, trends from a list of keywords

Thanks to our first article and to the different free keyword generators that we proposed, we had already obtained for our Nantes magician a nice list of keywords already established. However if the list of keywords plays on the lexical fields and the multiple possibilities of correlations between words, you can't know a primordial information : which keywords should I use in priority so that my site is more searched by the Internet users and thus the most seen ? It is then necessary that we use the keyword planning tool offered by Google Adwords.

Thus we only have to access directly with our list of keywords made beforehand, the second choice proposed at the home of the planning tool, that is to say the menu Get trends and data on the search volume. In the open window, ‘Enter keywords’ appears, we will copy the keywords from our list here.

For example, we start from our list of keywords obtained thanks to Keywords Shitter and we copy and paste them into our menu:

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This way, we will get the actual relevance results of the keyword list produced by our free generator.

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Be careful, however, regarding the expressions or groups of words found thanks to the previously selected tools (Answer the public or Soovle) we will avoid using them here because Google Keyword Planner is not the strongest to obtain results on groups of keywords. On the other hand, these lists of groups of words will be very useful to create new proposals. Patience, we will explain this in a future article!

Create an effective and sustainable keyword list for my website or blog posts

Whether we have created a table with the different keywords that we had pre-established thanks to the keyword generators previously recommended or whether we have found it here, it is now a question of saving them. For that, no need to bother us with a tedious screenshot or worse a nasty copy and paste, Google has thought of everything! And also for us, and for you!

Just click on the tab at the bottom of the graph and at the top of the table of keywords "Download". Then choose to print it in an Excel grid or in the proposed file format. However, we recommend the Excel keyword grid, which is easy to use, correct and transmit.

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And there you have it, for our friend the magician as well as for you, there is nothing left to do but to write the content of our site or our blog with the most relevant keywords thanks to the data provided by the Google AdWords keyword planning tool.

Conclusion

You have all the keys in hand to do your keyword research thanks to Google Keyword planner. Discover other tools to do your search.

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   Article written by Louis Chevant

Further reading

The complete guide to Internal Meshing

The step-by-step method to build your semantic cocoons, your mesh and the optimal tree structure of your website.