Build a smarter Google Ads strategy by learning how to conduct keyword research that aligns with your audience’s search behavior. Gain insight into the tools and techniques used by marketers to identify high-value keywords, assess competition, and refine campaigns over time.
Key Insights
- Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to uncover search volume, competition, and user intent for specific keywords.
- Apply an eight-step keyword research methodology starting with understanding your audience’s needs, brainstorming relevant keywords, analyzing search data, and incorporating long-tail keywords for more targeted audience segments.
- Organize keywords into thematic groups, such as product-based or audience-specific, and continually refine your strategy by monitoring campaign performance and leveraging AI-driven suggestions from platforms like Google Ads.
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What is keyword research? Keyword research helps brands understand the language and intent of their target audience by identifying and analyzing the words or phrases that people use when searching for information, products, or services. Keyword research is a crucial step and maximizes the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. It's where it all starts, right? You need to understand and select the keywords that your audience is actually using to search for products or services like your own.
Now there are tools that can help you do this research. They include the Google Keyword Planner, which is right on the Google Ads Manager platform, Google Trends, and a lot of free websites from Google, as well as paid research tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io, Ubersuggest, and KeywordSurfer. These are all again paid search-related platforms that can help you structure a keyword strategy.
You know, generally speaking, they have more robust tools than just the keyword product, but you can actually use the keyword product pretty effectively to set up a campaign. All right, so what are the eight steps of keyword research methodology? Number one, and we cannot overemphasize this point because this is where it's all about understanding your audience, right? What do they want? What products and services are they interested in? What features are important to them? What questions do they have? All of that is going to relate to keywords that they might use. Then we'll brainstorm and identify the keywords, you know, once you understand their needs.
Well, what value do these questions have? These are the features? So how does that relate to actual keywords that they may use? Then you take those keywords that you've created, you know, after brainstorming, and you can use one of the tools to analyze the search volume that's associated with that keyword. You can assess the competition and see which other competitors are also looking to compete for that same keyword, right, or bidding on that keyword. Understand the user intent.
Some of these platforms will tell you when someone is using that keyword, they're using it for informational reasons. They want to research more, and it's based upon their history, you know, prior to that search or other searches they've done. The algorithms will determine whether they're looking to find more information as opposed to users who are actually looking to do a transaction to purchase something.
You want to consider long tail keywords. What do long tail keywords provide? More specificity, right, enables you to get at more unique segments of the audience, audience segments with a particular need or a unique need. An example would be if you sell sneakers that are appropriate for people with flat feet.
Well, you have sneakers, you know, that fit that category. Well, you also want to bid on keywords related to that, right? If you are a digital education, digital marketing education provider, and you offer in addition to online, you also offer in-person classes in particular markets, you might want to include longer term local keywords, but also keywords that, you know, include digital marketing in person, right, you know, as opposed to just digital marketing education in person, as opposed to just digital marketing, right.
You would also want to group your keywords into themes, right, and themes might be product-related, usage-related, or audience-related, right. So all these keywords are relevant to this audience or to this product or to this sale. So you have themes, and you want to commit to an iterative process.
That means each time you are running these campaigns, you're seeing which keywords your audience is clicking on, which ones they're not, you remove the ones that don't seem to matter, and you add ones through your research, you discover that, oh, there are other keywords out there that my competitors might be getting traffic from, but I'm not, so I want to add that. Thankfully, Google Ads will do its algorithms, and AI provides recommendations each day about keywords that you could be adding and even lets you know keywords that you might not want to use anymore, all right. So we'll do an exercise together of using some of these tools, starting with Keyword Planner and also looking at it on SEMrush, where we discuss how to, you know, step through the keyword research, right, using seed keywords to analyze search bar volume, analyze competition, right.
