In this video we are going to be talking about one of the most used keyword tools, Google Keyword Planner. And while it’s an awesome tool, the problem is there are a couple of settings on there that if you don’t set these right, you are wasting your time. Stay tuned.
Hi Mike Mancini from PPC Video Training.com. I’m a Google Ads agency owner, I’m a trainer and a consultant and I’m here to help you use Google Ads to take your business to the next level. Google Keyword Planner, what an awesome tool it can be, but when used incorrectly, it can give you some statistics that are completely outside of what you actually think they are.
Different Places Search Differently
A lot of people depend on this tool to help give them an idea of what people are searching for, but one thing you need to keep in mind is different places search differently. And I’m not just talking about different countries, I’m talking about different States and I’m also talking about different cities in a metro area.
You’re killing me. Making his weekly appearance his task. Okay, stop, stop. Go, go away, go away. Who’s here? Who’s here? So before I was so rudely interrupted, we’ve had the experience of working with franchises in the past in the twin cities or Minneapolis, St. Paul metro area.
I have had seven different franchises placed around the cities. Now looking back at statistics, we realized that one part of the metro area searches for the same exact business and the same services completely differently than they do in other parts of the metro area.
And we started looking into that and we realized it’s not just about the services or the company, what they offer, it’s about how people are searching, but it’s based on education levels. It’s based on demographics, it’s based on race. It’s based on a number of different things that a lot of people just don’t take into account when they are using Google Keyword Planner. And we’re going to show you how to do that right now.
Use Google First
Okay. As always, we are going to try and fly through this example here. The first thing you need to do before you start messing with the Keyword Planner is you do need to go to Google. I know this seems counterintuitive. Everybody’s like started Keyword Planner.
I believe completely the opposite. I want to find five to 10 good keywords, and I mean quality keywords that people are searching. So let’s stick with our old trusted keyword example of plumbers because it’s easy. People understand it and I’m just not that creative to come up with another one.
So type in plumbers and as we type it in, you see it starts auto filling. It knows I’m in the Minneapolis St. Paul area, so it might auto plumbers and Minneapolis, plumber and St. Paul. But here’s what’s great plumbers near me. Now looking through these keywords, I’m going to grab five to 10 keywords that are going to be great keywords that I think are going to suggest exactly what I have to offer.
So maybe it’s plumbers in Minneapolis, plumbers near me, plumbers Minneapolis, and then maybe five or 10 more. I’m not going to take a lot of time, I’m just going to put a quick list together. So let’s skip to that. All right, so here based on that list, I quickly put together about nine keywords, plumbers, plumbing companies, plumbing contractors. You get the idea.
Now I’m inside Google Ads. You do need to have a Google Ads account already set up. It does not cost you anything, but you will have to enter payment information in case you do start running ads. They obviously need a way to get paid, but once you have a campaign set up, go to tools and settings, click on keyword planner. Let’s go to discover new keyword ideas.
I’m going to copy these keywords and I’m going to paste them in here. I’m going to type in get results. All right, so let’s go into some of the major problems there are with Google Keyword Planner as is meaning you have not made any changes to the settings. This is where the problem comes in. Number one, these are broad match searches.
So people will see that statistic and be like, “Oh my God, there’s 360,000 people that are typing this in on a monthly basis.” Not true. They could be typing in a form of that or a synonym or something that means absolutely completely the opposite of what that keyword is.
Set The Exact Location You Prefer
The other big mistake is right now this is set for United States. If I’m a plumbing contractor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this is not a realistic number. 368,000 people, that was essentially say almost every single person in Minneapolis last month looked for a plumber, probably not realistic.
So what you want to do is you want to go up here and click on the edit button. We want X out the United States or everywhere, wherever it is, and then type in just the area you’re looking for.
So Minneapolis, Minnesota. If it says Minneapolis, St. Paul, we don’t want to target that area if we’re not serving St. Paul. So let’s just stick with Minneapolis. As you can see, it shows up right here. Next thing, if you are servicing these other areas as well, you want to make sure that those come up.
So if you’re servicing St. Louis Park, Edina, Richfield and Mendota Heights, you want to type those in here as well. So Edina, Minnesota. You can target that and it shows up there. Now, just for argument’s sake, let’s just stick with Minneapolis and you want to click on save.
Now that 368,000 went down to about 1600 which is bit more realistic. Now let’s also address the other elephant in the room. When you’re looking at approximate cost per click and you see these numbers, $19.17 cents, $24.28, $26.89 even down here, $54.43 per click.
You need to understand that this is pulled from every advertiser using that particular keyword. Plumbing contractors in Minneapolis, you might have 100 different companies bidding on that keyword, which does drive the price up.
But let me tell you this, if you are setting your ads up and you were setting your campaigns up correctly, this cost per click is so far off, it’s not even funny. You can get it down for much, much less than this. When you check them off, you can actually set it up.
So add to plan, adding to a new ad group instead of broad match select phrase, probably over exact, exact is going to be very, very narrow. But phrase match are probably the best ones you’re going to want. And you can click on add keywords.
Then it will show you the ones that you’ve added to your plan. You can go over here to plan overview. So now this will be automatically set up as a forecast. These are going to be the keyword and the volume of searches, a forecast for this time period. So for the next month.
Now this will only go out about 30 days and you need to remember these are forecasts. But this will give you a good idea and you can go over in here and download, you can download plan forecasts. Download it to your computer and you can take a look and you will be able to see possibly what the keywords are that you should be targeting and how you should go about it.
Meaning plumbers near me might be an extremely competitive keyword. This is another great column to take a look at, competition. The closer this number is to one, the higher the competition. So for example, plumbing companies near me, you can see just based on the searches alone, it’s got a higher competition which is going to automatically mean more cost per click.
But if you go after some of the other ones, plumbing contractors, not as many searches, but probably less competition, which means less cost per click. And if you do your ads and your campaign is correctly, you will be able to capture those clicks.
Have you used Google Keyword Planner in the past and got results that were completely unexpected or completely outside of what you thought you were going to get? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear what you have to say.
Now, this is not the only mistake that people can have when working with keywords. In fact, we have another video, I will put a link to it in the upper right hand corner right here. And this video can talk about other mistakes you can make when you’re working with keywords and setting up your campaigns and it can save you a lot of money. So check that out.
So if you like other videos on Google Ads and how to get your campaigns running effectively.
Over on the right hand side, we have a couple of options. One is that other video that we talked about, Google keyword mistakes and another suggested video there as well. Thanks so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you next time.