Shopify SEO Course ↗️ > Unit 2 > Lesson 5 > Keyword Research Tactic #4: Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Google offers a powerful keyword research tool inside of Google AdWords called the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. If you’ve never used Google AdWords, you will need to create an account using your current Google account or a new Google account.
One of the tricky parts of setting up a new Google AdWords account is the setup wizard. If you start it by entering your email and website information in the form below, you will have to create your first Google AdWords Ad and enter your billing information before you can access Google AdWords Keyword Planner. To bypass this when creating a new account, be sure to click the Skip the guided setup link above the form asking for your email address and website.
Clicking on the link will take you to an account setup page that only requires you to enter some basic location and time zone information without having to create an ad or enter your billing information. From there, you will be able to access the Google AdWords Keyword Planner from the tools menu or this link.
Should you accidentally start the setup wizard for Google AdWords, you can create an ad campaign, enter your billing information, and then immediately pause the ad campaign from your Google AdWords dashboard so that it doesn’t run and charge your credit card.
Once inside Google AdWords Keyword Planner (GAKP), you can do the following.
GAKP offers three ways to get additional keyword suggestions as well as additional information about each keyword in order to determine its usage and competition. The first is by entering one or more keywords about your product or services, a website URL, or selecting a category of products.
If you enter one or more keywords about your product or services and click on the Keyword Ideas tab, you will potentially get hundreds of keyword suggestions that are related to the keywords you entered. The keywords you enter will be separated at the top as the seed keywords.
If you enter a landing page URL, such as a page from one of your competitors, Google will analyze the keywords it finds on that landing page and offer a similar list of keywords and suggestions.
If you simply choose a category, you will get the most popular keywords searched for within that category.
No matter which option you choose, you can see the average monthly searches for both the seed keywords and the keywords Google suggests. You will also see the competition level (Low, Medium, or High) based on the number of advertisers creating ads using Google AdWords and the suggested bid amount if you were to create an ad targeting people who search for that keyword.
At first glance, it may be difficult to understand how the average monthly searches would help you as they range from 10 – 100, 100 – 1K, 1K – 10K, 10K – 100K, 100K – 1M, and 1M to 10M. You can use the ranges to compare one keyword to another in terms of most often searched. For example, a keyword searched 10 – 100 times per month on average is less popular than a keyword searched 10K – 100K times.
Keywords that are all in a specific range, such as 10K – 100K could also be sorted by competition level or the dollar amount of the suggested bid. A keyword with twice the suggested bid value of another keyword could be seen as more valuable for your business since advertisers are willing to pay more for it.
If you like your list of keywords, you can use the Download button at the top right above the seed keywords to download them to a CSV, Excel, or Google Drive sheet. A spreadsheet can be especially useful if you want to filter or sort the list using monthly search volume or other criteria.
The second option is for those who have an established keyword list. If you feel like you have a solid list of keywords built up already from earlier keyword research methods, you can use the option to get search volume and data trends from your list by copying and pasting it into the form below or uploading it as a text document.
Google will analyze the keywords you have either pasted in or uploaded to give you the average monthly searches, competition, and suggested bid amounts for those keywords alone.
The third option is for those who have keywords that could be made into phrases. A simple example would be entering men’s, women’s, childrens, skinny, and other keywords into the first box and jeans in the second box.
When you click the Get search volume button, you will get the average monthly searches, competition level, and suggested bid amount for the combination of keywords.
Giles Thomas
CEOOptimize your Shopify conversion rates. 5 lesson course, learn 51 ecommerce best practices to get more visitors to buy.
