Hey, how’s it going, gang? Justin Croxton here once again. I think we’re in module five now. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the Google Keyword Planner. I think that when it comes to a lot of the different tools, as you know, media planners, as digital strategists, as anything that has to do with digital in the world of paid search, Google keyword planner is probably one of the best tools that’s out there. Part of the reason why I say that is over the past 25 plus years, 20 years, Google has done an incredible job of getting a sense of what C keywords or what keywords in general, ancillary keywords, are relevant to the C keywords that you may put into a search query. And they’ve gotten so good over the years that as I do a couple searches and do a little bit of planning with you all, you’ll notice that there’s so many different options that are available that you can pretty much come up with a pretty robust keyword list.

In the last module, we talked about asking the client a question around strategy, specifically around give me five to 10 keywords that you think are relevant. That’s usually, literally all we need to get started. For all those that’s trying to be self-sufficient, not feel like you got to always reach out to your Google rep in order to do the keyword planning for you, literally you can do it yourself and it just makes you a smarter, not so much more intelligent, but a more self-sufficient media planner for that matter.

I’m going to do a quick demo for everyone, but I just wanted to show everyone a little bit of what this looked like. I mean, this is what the interface looks like, essentially. This is the Google keyword planner itself. You’ll notice that we have HVAC repair was one of the keywords that we did a sample search for and you see all the different variations that comes up. I’m going to walk everyone through what this process looks like, but I wanted to just kind of give you a little bit of a teaser. So thanks for taking the time. I will see you on the intro to the Google keyword planner.

Okay. So Google keyword planner. The first note that I want to make to everyone is that in order to gain access to the Google keyword planner, you do have to have a Google AdWords account set up through your managed client services account and it’s not hard. You can create a dummy account and everybody that’s on the sales team, all account managers, you can essentially be listed as users for what we call a dummy account, so that you can then gain access to the keyword planner, but it’s a lot of really cool things in here. We’re not going to talk about the performance planner or the reach planner or any of these other tools. I think for the simplicity of this conversation, we’re going to really keep it to the keyword planner itself.

Once you’re in here, you actually have two different options. The first is you can discover new keywords, that’s where you get keyword ideas that help you reach people interested in your product and services, and then you can also get a sense of volume in forecasting if you want. I typically, nine out of 10 times, utilize this module here with discover new keywords. And so we’re going to use a few different stylized examples.

The first in this case, let’s say just really quickly, if a client did not give you any keywords and you just wanted to start with their website, you can actually do that as well. Typically what Google will do, it will scan the client’s website. It will look at your H1, H2, H3 tags, assume those are your primary keywords and try to come up with a list of keywords that’s relevant. In most cases, I don’t go about it that way. I like to use the keyword planner itself. Let’s say I type in here HVAC repair, similar to the other approach that we took sort of in the intro that we were doing, you can kind of see that when you do that search, it actually gives you a couple of really nice things here. The first is a graph that kind of shows the demand, and if you look at it, it kind of makes sense. You typically see an increase in demand during the hotter seasons. So people need help getting their HVAC repaired. You see that kind of ticks up. They give you a breakdown of total traffic, as well as mobile traffic as well. You can see that continues into August, and then it kind of starts to dip down and stay flat during this period of time. Then it dips back up.

But the most important aspect I believe is here. This is where all the gold is. If I wasn’t an HVAC repair person, I would be saying to myself, wow, I didn’t know all these other terms. I mean, yeah, I know the terms, but I don’t necessarily think about them as proactively as an HVAC repair person might. And so in this case, you have HVAC repair, AC repair near me, AC repair, furnace repair, all these other terms and it’s not just one to 10. I mean, there’s well over close to a thousand. So if you want to see the full list, you click 500 and you can see this is sorting by way of monthly searches. And so this is literally how many searches occurred in one month for just the word, just the exact word, AC repair. Same thing for air conditioner repair.

As you’re trying to devise a keyword plan, you don’t necessarily want to just focus on HVAC repair because there’s probably a lot of other keywords that’s truly relevant to the search query and the person’s intent to buy. Again, in my mind, I’m thinking HVAC repair is probably the biggest one, but it’s not. AC repair near me, AC repair, air conditioner repair are the biggest searches that are out there, and you would not have known that unless you actually plugged in a keyword like HVAC repair into the tool itself. As you scroll down here, you see all the other keywords, all the other ones that can help generate ideas for you that could be relevant.

And then you can also kind of see here that they have some other potential keywords, plumbing trade, that may not be as relevant, repaired by itself, obviously that’s well too broad, heating and cooling, you may think that’s relevant, but we’re looking for someone that may be looking to repair by HVAC, not just the word heating and cooling. Same thing with climate control, maybe HVAC service. I would probably strongly consider that one. Home repair, absolutely not, that’s well, too broad. So now you all can kind of get a much better sense of how you go about doing your own media planning in your keyword strategy for clients.

The last thing that I’ll note is these keywords, these search volumes are across all the United States, not all cases, but in most cases, I just stick with the United States. If you really want to get granular into an individual city, you can. I don’t think it’s entirely relevant because typically the search volumes that you see across the United States extrapolates inward to a lot of the different cities and states all around the United States or all around the world. In most cases, not all the time, most cases, but in this instance, you see how I sort of relegated the traffic to just Atlanta, Georgia. You can kind of see there’s still quite a bit of volume of searches that are occurring via these keywords.

And remember, in the prior module, one of the things that I talked about from a strategy perspective is you want to have keywords that’s well over 30 to 50 searches in any given month. And so for me, I would take all the keywords, even some of these other ones that might be a 20, I would take all of these, fully understand, okay, the client is primarily interested in HVAC repair. Maybe they don’t want to do anything around furnace blowing, or duct work repair, or anything of that nature. I’ll go through that process myself, and then what you can all also finally do is take this list of keywords and I’m just going to change this back to the United States. Cause I just kind of like to do my searches based fully of the United States instead of just an individual city. Again, I recommend you do it based in the entire United States, not just a city, that would be my suggestion.

And then what I’ll do a lot of times is I’ll download that report itself. Let’s see how long it takes to download. Let’s see here. See, I got some other stuff that’s populating on my laptop. Okay. Perfect. And this is what the Excel spreadsheet ends up looking like. You can see this pulled data for the past year gives you a nice date range. And so I kind of like to clean up my Excel spreadsheet a little bit. I typically like to sort the data by average search volume. So I’ll come up here, sort it that way. Perfect.

And then this is some of the things that a lot of other Google ad specialists won’t do, but a lot of the folks on our team does in fact do this and we recommend that as a media planner, as a strategist, you consider this as well. You don’t have to do all of the keywords, but I’ll take a column and I’ll call it like keepers, the ones that I know that the client’s probably going to really want to focus on. I’ll come in here and I’ll say, okay, keepers, I want to do air conditioner repair near me, this one, furnace repair I’m not so sure, this one or this one, I might just put a maybe. This looks good. HVAC companies, HVAC repair, furnace repair, maybe HVAC repair near me or conditioning installation. I’ll do that one anyway.

Anyway, yep. So I’ll go through this exercise until I get to about 100, maybe 200. You can see here, even as you get to 100, you’ve still got a lot of search volume, but typically in my experience, if you do the top 100, we’re trying to make the process as easy as possible for the clients that we’re working with. And so I don’t want to go through this process and say, “Hey client, look through all a thousand keywords and tell me the ones that you want to advertise against.” The clients that we all work with want to see forth the effort that we put into the strategy for across all these different campaigns that we’re running.

And so in this case, I’ll go through the top 100 keywords. I’ll clean this up. I might get rid of some of these other columns because some of this other stuff may not be as relevant. Y’all don’t have to worry about this other stuff anyway. I don’t think it’s as relevant in this case. Client might get confused with some of this other stuff, but I might want to keep it in there just for myself, just to make sure certain I’m on top of my P’s and Q’s. I’ll then do something simple, like, okay, I’ll highlight the column itself so he knows which one we’re focused on. I’ll resave it with a new title, and then I will literally send this list to the client.

The reason why this part is so important is because a lot of times, if you’re running a campaign and you think you know the keywords that the client wants to advertise on, but you’re sharing a dashboard and they see a keyword and they’re like, hey, hey, hey, wait a second. I didn’t ask to advertise against that keyword. You’re wasting my money. You’re fired. Now, we haven’t had that experience. However, we’ve had the experience of meeting clients firing over keywords that we didn’t want to use, but clients getting frustrated because we used a keyword that we genuinely thought was relevant, but contextually, the client knew that keyword wasn’t relevant. And so that’s why when you send this list over to them and they confirm it, they’ve already told you in that moment this is my market, these are the people, “the keywords” that I want to advertise against. And so that’s why I go in and I download that individual keyword list.

This is just a stylized example for HVAC repair. If you wanted to do orthodontists near me, that might be another great example. And again, you can see how you get a lot of really good search terms relevant to orthodontists near me. All of the other terms that are probably relevant, like braces, braces dental near me, pediatric orthodontists near me, all these terms that are relevant, you can download that list as a CSV file and send that over to the client.

Let’s think about some other keywords that might be relevant. Let’s see here. Let’s do lawyers. I don’t want to do lawyers near me. Instead, I want to do personal injury lawyers near me. Perfect. Oh, that’s weird. Sometimes you’ll get that. You’ll get like, oh, we don’t have any keywords. Personal injury attorney. You got to play around with it sometimes, and then it will pop up for you. So you can see here, again, all the other derivations of personal injury attorneys near me. You can see the different search volumes, all that stuff is really, really good.

And then lastly, we’ll do a one last one pest control near me. I really like this one because you get to see pest control near me, but all the other terms, again, exterminator near me, pest control companies, bed bug exterminator near me, Terminex near me, pest control, best pest control near me, Orkin, all those other competitor terms. Again, you can download all these terms and then export them and just clean up the data and share with the client just to get their formal confirmation.

From a keyword strategy standpoint, this is by far the main tool that I personally use. There are a lot of other tools out there like SCM Rush, Moz, they have a decent tool as well. There’s a lot of other ones, some other ninja type ones too, Adzooma that we utilize for keyword strategy. But in terms of free tools, this by far does it for you. You don’t need anything else but this in my judgment.

If folks out there, if you want to play around, get a sense of forecasting of keywords and what have you and give you a sense of your max cost for click, clicks and impressions, that kind of thing, you can certainly do that with those terms that you pulled. You just kind of plop those in here or you can actually copy and paste those keywords if you want to get a full forecast. But for the simplicity of this conversation, just use the keyword planner to help generate keywords, and then you do some of that manual work yourself. It should not take you more than 10, 15 minutes max, 15 minutes max, to do that research and then send the client over your list of keywords that you recommend based on what they told you. And it really helps develop both a proper strategy and a really good conversation with the client that stage.

I hope this has been helpful. We can certainly walk you through how to get access to the keyword planner tool, but it’s really not too difficult. Thanks for everyone for listening, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone on the next module. Talk to you soon. Take care.