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In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, keyword research is arguably the most critical aspect of your campaign. When you do it effectively, it offers a solid foundation from which your campaign — and your business — can grow.
However, if you don’t conduct proper keyword research, your campaign will struggle to ever get off the ground, and your budget will plummet as a result.
It may surprise you to realize that you can have great success with free keyword research. Even a free keyword research tool can help you discover relevant, high-intent keywords to build your PPC campaign around.
Let’s see how it’s done.
Nowadays, advertisers have a lot of keyword research tools to choose from, such as SEMrush, KWFinder, and SpyFu. These are excellent for performing keyword research and competitor analysis, allowing you to learn more from your competitors and identify top-performing keywords that attract a lot of traffic.
When it comes time to do keyword research for your campaign, there are two strategies — paid and unpaid. In this guide, we’ll look at how to do keyword research with free tools.
Google has a free keyword research tool that you can use to analyze and discover strong keywords. With this, you can compile an optimized keyword list that consists of search terms that are relevant to your business, your products, and your audience.
Using Google’s practical keyword analysis tools, you can effectively develop a robust, efficient keyword list for your ad campaign.
Follow the steps below to make it happen:
Before anything else, you must get clear with your goals for paid advertising. What objectives do you hope to achieve with your PPC campaign?
Common goals include:
By setting defined goals, you will understand the scope of your PPC campaign and will reduce wasted spend that could occur in an unfocused campaign. Also, your goals act as guidelines to help you find relevant terms in your keyword research.
If your online store sells smartphones, drones, and cameras, you should target keywords relevant to your goals, for example:
The more detail the keyword includes the more targeted it is, which means you will attract a smaller, but more engaged audience for that search term.
Another free keyword research tool from Google is the Google Search Console. Marketers can put this to good use by searching for terms they are thinking about bidding on.
Here are some tips and best practices:
Many marketers overlook their competition, dismissing them solely as threats. The reality is that your competitors can serve up new opportunities for your business. You need to conduct some competitor analysis to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses, which gives you the insights you need to take advantage of gaps in the market.
You can use Google Search Console to figure out what keywords are triggering your competitors’ ads, and which search queries help their ads rank in higher ad positions.
It’s important to consider other keywords that your competitors aren’t using. Don’t just go for high-volume terms. Quite often, it pays off when you target phrases that have slightly less volume, but also less competition and a lower bidding price.
While Google Search Console offers a lot of information about user intent, keywords, and relevance, it lacks in-depth analytics. This is where Google Keyword Planner excels.
You can use this free keyword research tool in two ways:
Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.
When you navigate to the “Discover new keywords” tab, you will need to enter a keyword in the search bar.
Google Keywords Planner will then serve up a list of trending keywords that are relevant to your specified domain. In the interface, as the list is populated, you will see some crucial metrics for each keyword:
To illustrate this, we can consider the earlier example of the keyword, “electronic gadgets”. When we enter this, the tool generates the following list, which contains over 1000 keywords:
Aside from being relevant, you can see that the list includes many terms with high search volume and relatively low competition.
Next, you can cross-reference these terms on Google Search Console to verify their relevance. With these two tools together, it’s possible to create a very efficient list of effective keywords that will reap big rewards in your PPC advertising campaign.
Google Keyword Planner provides historical statistical data for keywords, which enables you to gauge past performance and emerging trends. You can gain actionable insights from this data to make projections about expected impressions, clicks, and costs.
These insights are beneficial in many ways, as they guide your decision-making so that you can refine your keywords lists and take informed action in your Google Ads account.
When we look for statistical trends of the “electronic gadgets” keyword, we see the following projections:
In the “Historical Metrics” tab, we can see the previous trends of this keyword, including its average search volume to date.
When you carry out thorough keyword research, it’s easy to find potent keywords for your Ad groups. Continue searching for new keywords until you have a comprehensive list of relevant, valuable terms for your PPC campaign.
After you have a solid list, you can move on to Google trends to get a better understanding of how the keywords may perform in the future.
Google Trends is a free tool that shows you the popularity of specific keywords in Google searches. You can enter a keyword in the search bar, and the program will generate a graph that indicates the use of that keyword over time. Marketers can use Google trends to learn about keyword trends, obtaining information on demographics, similar topics, and related search queries.
If you want to gain insights about a keyword’s performance over time, you can use this graph. It will tell you whether a keyword is being used more often or less often as time goes on.
When we entered the keywords “electronic gadgets” and “buy gadgets” in comparison in Google Trends, it generated the graph below:
The fluctuations in usage suggest that these keywords are used during specific times, such as at the end of the year, closer to Christmas.
The graph indicates a decline in the use of the keyword “electronic gadgets” over time. If you have keywords like this and are concerned about search volume, you can find better alternatives by looking at the related search queries section.
Of course, it’s still viable to use a keyword with declining usage in your campaign, especially if it is domain-specific. However, it’s a wise move to consistently look for relevant, high search volume keywords that display increasing usage trends.
For example, we discovered the keyword “electronic devices” has a consistent trend over time, and it also generates a higher search volume each month. By using Google Keyword Planner, you can dig deeper into the historical statistical data of this keyword to determine if it is suitable for your PPC campaign.
This free keyword research tool is a part of Google Trends, and it is beneficial for local search engine optimization (SEO). You can study the map to see usage trends of keywords in regards to specific geographical locations. This will guide your targeting, as you can add or remove locations from your campaign according to the potential the keywords show in those areas.
When you are finished analyzing the factors above for every keyword in your list, you can move on to one of the more advanced tools for historical keyword analysis — Google Correlate.
It’s not just marketers or PPC advertisers that are interested in this tool. Indeed, many economists and scientists have found uses for this, leveraging the advanced features and insights to study human behavior and search patterns.
Google Correlate makes it possible to compare multiple keywords and identify associated trends from one search term to the next. By taking historical data into account, it can generate other user search queries that display similar patterns or data trends.
Among its key features are:
The Correlate Value is in relation to other search queries and it helps you find terms with similar metrics. This value ranges from 1 (high correlation) to -1 (low correlation).
It may be tempting to finish your keyword research here. However, even if you conduct extensive keyword research with these tools in an in-depth manner, you shouldn’t just do it once. As market trends and consumer behaviors continue to evolve, so too will keyword usage. Therefore, keyword research is a continuous process, which demands a consistent approach.
You can use each of these tools to help create an optimized keyword list, which contains relevant, high-value keywords that will help you achieve your PPC campaign goals.
After you discover new keywords in Google Trends and Google Correlate, use Google Keyword Planner to analyze each term in more detail. This additional research will help you verify their credibility.
Here are nine expert tips to keep in mind during your keyword research. By adopting these as your best practices, you’ll have little trouble finding keywords that deliver an impressive return on investment (ROI).
User intent is an integral consideration during keyword research. Keeping it in mind will help you find relevant keywords, which leads to more relevant ads for your target audience. Conversely, disregarding user intent could lead to low Ad rank and poor quality score as a result of irrelevant ads. To maximize this factor, create detailed buyer personas for your audience, and use these to guide your keyword research.
It’s easy to end up with a long list of keywords at first. After using these tools, you can refine the list to eliminate any low-performing search terms. Consider factors like search volume and competition to identify the important ones, and weed out the less valuable keywords.
Many advertisers make the mistake of choosing keywords with high search volume above all else.
With the keyword tools from Google, you can discover lots of similar keywords to your initial choice. However, you’ll find terms that will not only save you money, but they will also be more likely to get your ads to rank in Google’s search results.
You may sacrifice a little search volume, but choosing terms with a lower cost-per-click (CPC) rate and less competition can generate a better ROI in the end.
Some people invest heavily in specific terms, even if they aren’t ranking with it. This is a mistake, as it may be too competitive or irrelevant for your business.
What you should do is turn your attention to the keywords that are helping your ads rank at the top. By increasing your bids on these, you can leverage their value to increase your returns.
As we’ve mentioned, Google Trends help you learn more about the trends of keywords during specific periods. This is useful around popular shopping seasons, such as Christmas. Take full advantage of this keyword research tool to ensure you are using the right keywords for the right products at the right time.
By grouping your keywords into specific categories, you can improve audience targeting. You should use different keyword categories for each Ad group, considering factors like customer demographics, geo-location, and the peak times they are active online.
Over time, this strategy proves to be more efficient in driving traffic to your website. With the right keywords and optimized lists, you will soon see an uptick in your conversion rates. Just remember to continue filtering these lists to enhance your targeting as time goes on.
In PPC advertising, it’s vital to create a negative keywords list. Without it, your ads may attract unqualified users who click your ad but have little to no intention of converting. Adding these irrelevant search terms as negative keywords will help you filter out these users, ensuring you don’t incur a lot of wasted spend on clicks that won’t convert. In the long-term, this tactic increases traffic quality and the profitability of your campaign.
When it comes to your keyword bids, you should strive for a balanced approach. To master this, get into the habit of regular keyword performance analysis so you can understand the patterns of your keywords and ads.
PPCexpo offers advertisers advanced reporting tools that make it easy to pinpoint the keywords that are delivering most of your traffic.
This is a big one for Local SEO. However, you don’t just need to be promoting small business in the local town to use geographic terms in PPC advertising.
By adding specific countries, cities, or regions to your keywords, you can hone your targeting to promote your products and services in the areas you wish to grow your business. This allows you to control spending, so you focus on the geographical areas you believe will reap the most significant rewards.
A free keyword research tool can generate fantastic insights. But you shouldn’t stop there — it’s not a one-and-done task.
While it may seem confusing and long-winded process, the merits of conducting in-depth keyword research with several tools are well-documented. If you want to bolster your chances of a high ROI from PPC advertising, you’ll be glad to hear Google provides all the tools you need for free.
Like everything else in PPC, a consistent approach increases your chances of success. By continuing to research trends and performance, you will keep finding valuable keywords to add to your campaign.
This ongoing optimization process solidifies the foundation of your Google Ads account, and from there, your campaign will flourish.
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