Easy Keyword Research with Google Keyword Planner

You intend to build a website for your existing business. Your company has been in operation for more than five years, and you have a large number of customers in your local area. Your business is “Hair salon” and it offers hair “coloring”, “haircut” and “botanical treatment”

Keyword Base and Expansion

Go to your Google keyword planner and add the base keywords you identified based on your company and its services.

To expand your keywords, add 3 to 5 related keywords that are relevant to your business.

Keyword Refinement

You can refine the keywords based on your needs by doing the following:

• Select brand or non-brand keywords
• Enter target location
• Excluding searchers that have adult ideas
• Select keywords that have an average monthly search of 1000
• Select product and service items that is applicable to your business

By then, we should have a list of keywords to begin analyzing. I do not recommend having a large keyword list; I keep the number of keywords under 100. You can discover more keywords relevant to your niche once you have a website or run a campaign.

Export your keyword list and only include the most important columns. At the very least, your spreadsheet should include the columns listed below.

• Average Monthly Searches — the average number of times people search for a keyword and similar terms based on the month range, the location, and your Search network settings. This will show whether the current keyword has increasing, decreasing, or steady demands.
• YoY Change — the comparison of the latest month’s monthly search volume with the same month the previous year. This will demonstrate the fluidity of the keywords; how has it changed since last year? how fast does it move?
• Competition — it shows the competitive ad placement for a keyword, specific to the location and Search Network targeting options that you have selected.

Keyword Selection

We will use quartiles to interpret each column of data to determine variations. Based on the threshold level, we will later assign a descriptive translation of each column value. To start, we will use the formula :

Quartile(data, quartile_number)

where;

• Data — The range or array of data to be considered for the calculation
• Quartile_number — Which quartile number between 0 and 4 to send back.

Given our data set, you should have similar results.

Use the condition below to interpret monthly search volume:

• Below or equal to 1300 are low-volume searches
• Above or equal to 3600 are high-volume searches
• Anything in between is moderate volume searches

Repeat the process above in the next column (YoY change) using the following condition:

• Below or equal to 0% are decreasing volume searches
• Above or equal to 53% are increasing volume searches
• Anything in between is steady volume searches

Create a new column “Remark” by combining the keyword “average monthly volume “(Volume) and the “YoY change” (Trend) using the “CONCATENATE” function of the spreadsheet.

Create another column “Priority” to interpret the value of the new column “Remarks”. Use the following condition:

We can highlight the high and low-priority keywords by using cell conditional formatting.

Gather all highest, high and moderate keywords and map them out according to user intention.

So far, we have done the following:

1. Keyword Baseline. Choosing our baseline keywords. It is usually a shorter list of phrases that define which products, services, or pages you want to promote the most.
2. Keyword Expansion. Expanded these keywords based on the suggested phrases by Keyword Planner.
3. Keyword Filtering/Refinement. Implemented different keyword filtering based on average monthly searches, location, services, and brands.
4. Keyword Selection. We established various rules, such as the use of “quartiles,” to arrive at a structured method for interpreting the results of our refinement process.
5. Keyword Intent Mapping. Finally, we get all moderate to high priority keywords and map them based on search intent.

There is no more dependable source of keywords than the search engine itself. We don’t just choose keywords; we also examine their individual performance over time. Why? because we shouldn’t create content based on what we want to tell people; instead, we should create content based on what people want to discover.

There are other approaches to developing a creative list of keywords. You can begin by obtaining the keywords used by your competitors, or you can use a free method such as getting the related search term, People Also Asked or Google autocomplete. Whichever method you use, make sure to revisit the process and update your target keywords whenever it is necessary. You’ll discover that you can add more and more keywords to your lists to target as you work on maintaining your current presence and then expanding into new areas.

You can download the spreadsheet here.