Using Google Ads to Find the Right Keywords for Your Business [Free Template]

Whether you are developing blog content, creating a new site, building an Inbound Marketing strategy or looking for ways to grow your reach online with SEO, keyword research is essential. Finding the right terms to go after doesn’t have to be difficult. In this week’s SMA Marketing Minute, we are going to walk through an easy way to find the right keywords to target using Google AdWords Keyword and our very own Keyword Research Template.

Get Your Free Keyword Research Template Here

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s everybody? I’m Ryan Shelley and you are watching the SMA Marketing Minute. Today we’re actually going to do a brief tutorial of how we start the keyword research process. Keyword research can be very, very intense and in-depth, but we are going to give you peek under the hood of how we do it and how we can get started.

These are the first steps we take in targeting the right keywords for our clients and for our own website. We’re using this free tool. It’s a keyword research template which you can download below. This is going to help you keep things organized but also help make sure that you’re going after terms that are not just high-volume and low in competition, but also very relevant to your website. That’s really important. We want to make sure that we keep things as relevant as possible.

So we are going to use our website as an example, smamarketing.net and we want to make sure that we are targeting keywords that are going to drive traffic from business owners or people who are looking for either a new website design or a comprehensive  inbound marketing plan that can drive traffic.

One of the tools that we start off with always is AdWords keyword planner. It’s a free tool from Google which you can use to do a number of things. You can search for new keywords using a phrase or website or category. You can multiply your keyword list to get new keyword ideas. What we will really be using it for right now is to look at some search volume data and trends. A lot of times people come to us and say I want to rank for term “X”. So we start to do some research on that term or phrase and we find that nobody’s using that. We would be wasting our time if we developed our plan around a keyword that nobody’s actually searching for. So this will help give us a better idea of what people are actually searching for and how we can start to build a campaign around that.

So you probably see this little thing the ads are not running. I am actually not doing any SEM through Google AdWords. I really recommend you checking it out after we’re done with our keyword research because this is extremely important.

So what you can do is enter keywords here. If you have a list, you can upload it. I pre-made a list in just a word document right over here. So I’m going to go ahead and copy this list of keywords and keyword phrases into here. Just one per line, that’s all you gotta do.  When you’re done click this button “get search volume.”

What this is now doing is kind of, running the list through the Google searches and seeing how many average monthly searches are done around that particular keyword. What’s the competition? What’s the suggested price if you’re doing AdWords. Really what we want to look at is the average monthly searches and the competition. Those are two very key pieces of information. Once you’ve run your keywords through this list click the download button. And we want it to be in an Excel file. So download and save it.

So now we’ve got this nice Excel file from our friends over at Google with a lot of information, right. It’s got the ad group, we don’t have an ad group. It tells us the currency, so a number of pieces of information that we really aren’t going to need for our keyword planner template. The three columns that you need are keywords, average monthly searches and the competition. Before you saw it said low, medium, high. Well this actually breaks it down even further and tells you how competitive that keyword is. One is 100%, so it’s like really really high. So anything below that, you can see the .89 that’s a really, really competitive keyword and then you have something like .11 which is not so competitive.

The first thing we want to do is copy all of the keywords and we’ll just go ahead and paste them right into here.

The next thing we want to do is get our monthly search volume and paste it into volume. Now you are starting to see this list over here start to to populate right. It’s starting to take into account how long the keyword is as well as how much traffic that keyword gets per a month.

Now let’s take a look and copy our competition and paste that right to here. Now after that, you’re done with this exported file from Google so you can close it out or save it if you want to.  I’m now going to go ahead and do that. What we have now, we have our keywords all lined up here. We have the average monthly search volume and the competition. The length is already being pulled for us as well determining how long. Maybe it’s a one word like SEO or we’ve got search engine optimization which is a little bit more of the long tailed keyword.

The next step is to go through and determine the relevancy of these key terms. We use a scale between 1 to 10. One is not relevant at all 10 is exactly what we are going after. So I’ll go ahead and pull some of these terms up. Start to assign them different levels of relevancy based on really who were trying to target. This is where your judgment is going to come into play because you’re going to want to make sure that you look also at search volume. If there’s no traffic like if it’s a 10, 10 really mean zero, 10 and 20 those are really not, 20 you can go after, but 10 just just get rid of those from your list. My industry has a lot of searches obviously you can see, so a lot of these keywords are going to pull a lot of traffic.  But it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to rank for them, it just means that these are some keywords I can target or also spin off and create variations like Web Design Melbourne Florida, you know because that’s we are located.  We can even start to take these really broad terms and make them even more long tailed.

So when you’ve gone through this whole list and added all of the stuff that you need to add here to make sure that you are going to find the keywords that are most relevant to your site, were going to reorganize this list.  What we want to organize this list by is results. Because that’s gonna give us the best case scenario.

In order to do that you just go to data > sort > column > results largest to smallest. What this is going to do is categorize our keywords from largest to smallest. It tells us which ones we should place the most emphasis on. So you should have at least 50, if not more, keywords in this list. Go through the steps. Run the data and then this top 10 to 30 are really the ones you want to focus on right away; the ones you want to start to look at and develop content around because those are the keywords that are going to drive traffic to your site.

Hope you guys found this quick tutorial helpful. If you have any questions on the keyword research template or keyword research or SEO or Inbound Marketing, please shoot me an e-mail at ryan@smamarketing.net.