Go onto any digital marketing blog and there’s one term you’ll see plastered all over the place: keywords.

That’s because keywords are what helps your website and content get delivered to your customers. For example, if someone breaks their sink, they might need an emergency plumber. They’ll more than likely Google the term “emergency plumber in Northampton” (if they live in Northampton of course).

Generally, if one of your keywords matches this search, your website or ad will be right in front of them, ready for them to click. That means keywords influence who finds your business and aren’t something to be brushed aside easily.

Yet, so many people don’t take advantage of the readily available tools that you can use to really perfect your keywords. Their loss is your gain. Want to step ahead of your competition and attract more visitors to your website?

Use a keyword planner.

What do keyword planners do?

Keyword planners are a way of researching and uncovering data about your potential keywords before you use them. Whether you’re just looking to improve your organic search rankings through SEO strategies or perfect your paid advertising, the information you get from keyword planners is essential.

With keyword planners, you can find useful metrics such as:

• Average monthly searches
• Competition
• Bid estimates
• Related keywords
• Projected clicks
• Projected impressions
• Projected clickthrough rate

All of which are useful in helping plan your keyword strategy and get new customers through your door.

Which keyword planner should you use?

When it comes to keyword planners, Google’s Keyword Planner is the primary choice. But unfortunately, you can’t access this information without entering your billing information for your Google Ads account.

If you’re already set up and running Google Ads, then this is no bother. If not, there are plenty of alternatives out there, including:

• Mangools KWFinder
• SEMrush
• Keyword Tool
• InstaKeywords

We have an in-depth guide on SEO keyword tools you should check out for more information.

How to generate ideas with a keyword planner

First of all, keyword planners are a great way of generating ideas for building your keyword lists, as well as topics to write about on your website.

Let’s say that you’re a local beekeeper that sells organic honey online.

With this in mind, we pick ‘organic Yorkshire honey’ as a base for our search. This gives us the following results:

Now, some of these, like ‘bees for sale Yorkshire’ aren’t useful for our business. But this can be useful for generating ideas and new keywords.

If you’re seeing a lot of questions that come up, it can also help influence your content. These are questions that your customers have.

On seeing the keyword “where can i buy raw honey”, you might decide to write a blog post on your website or even a page that answers it. You’ll tell your users exactly where and how they can buy raw honey and then guide them to your honey store after you’ve built some trust. It’s useful, it’s insightful and is what your customers are searching for.

How keyword data helps your business

You’ve searched your keywords and now have all that juicy information. Now what?

You need to use it to make sure that you’re selecting the right keywords for your business. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time, effort and money on something that won’t deliver the results you need.

Using the same beekeeper business, we’ll start with generic keywords such as ‘bee’ or ‘honey’.

As you can see, these keywords are pretty broad, receiving 10-100k searches a month.

Having a broader keyword can potentially help you reach a lot of people. But the problem is that sometimes your message can be diluted.

That’s because this search doesn’t just include people looking for local honey. It also covers a wide range of people that are searching for other reasons.

This is why broad keywords aren’t always worth the resources you put into it. That’s because you’re not just targeting your customers, but people who just won’t want your services. They also tend to be more expensive and competitive. Which means you’re paying more to appear in front of audiences who ultimately don’t care.

Let’s compare this to a less heavily searched keyword such as ‘local honey near me’.

Now, this keyword doesn’t get as much volume as the others.

In general, this means you’ll pay less and have less competition. But it’s not just about the money.

These keywords have a much narrower focus. So, you’re more likely to target those who are your actual customers. Low search volume keywords can give a higher ROI when targetted correctly.

That’s because if someone is searching for local honey near them, it’s pretty clear what they want. They want honey. That’s local. They’re much further along the buying journey and ready to buy.

All they need is to find out where they can buy from.

These type of keywords are called long tail keywords. They’re normally made up of 4 or more words that create very specific search terms

The name, in exciting news, comes from a statistic graph showing the types of keywords that are searched. These keywords are the end portion of this graph that just seems to go on and on, which looks like a long tail. Makes sense right?

Keyword planners are a great way of discovering long tail keywords, which can form a key part of your strategy.

Plan your PPC campaigns with a keyword planner 

Keywords play a key role in making sure that ads are shown in the right places.

But if you’re bidding on the wrong keyword, you’re literally throwing money away on the wrong audiences.

Keyword planners are a good way to do your research before you spend any money by showing you exactly what you can be expecting to pay per keyword.

If you’re using Google’s keyword planner, this data is available under the ‘get search volume and forecasts’ section on the start screen.

This section allows you to add all your keywords as an ad group, seeing how they’ll be able to work together to get you the best from your budget.

For example, we’ve added the following keywords together, which individually returned this data.

For those that need it, here’s a quick rundown of what each term means when using that particular keyword:

• Clicks. This is how many clicks your adverts are projected to get.
• Impressions. This is how many people your adverts are expected to reach.
• Cost. This is the total cost you would be expected to pay for your entire campaign.
• CTR. This is the expected percentage of people who will click your ads after viewing them. For example, if 10 people saw your advert but only 5 people clicked, your CTR would be 50%.
• Average CPC. This is a breakdown of how much it would cost every time someone clicked your ad.

Altogether, these keywords can deliver:

Unfortunately, we can’t tell you how to do this bit for you.

You should already have a marketing budget in place and know how much you want to spend and what goals you want to achieve.

This tool makes it easier to estimate what keywords you need to make it happen.

Need more help with your keywords? 

Adzooma has you covered.

Once your campaigns are up and running, we’ve got the platform you need to monitor your data and make the most of your results.

Our Opportunity Engine uses machine learning to analyse your accounts. It takes a look at your keywords, creating suggestions to improve your campaigns such as:

• Increasing or decreasing your keyword bids
• Creating or removing negative keywords
• Pausing underperforming keywords
• Removing duplicate keywords

It’s not just used for keywords but gives you personalised opportunities to improve over 50 aspects of the performance of your campaigns. What’s more, any changes you want to make can be actioned from our platform in seconds.

Combined with easy, customisable reporting, alerts and automation features, Adzooma is here to save you valuable time and money on your paid advertising.

Ready to see for yourself how we can help optimise your campaigns? Try Adzooma today.