When I started blogging a little over 2 years ago, I just wrote. I had no idea what keywords or SEO was, and I darn sure didn’t know what Google’s Keyword Planner was or how to use keyword planner to benefit my site. It took me almost a year to figure out that I should really be using a plethora of tools to optimize my site for more than just fun. I found Google Adwords by mistake and have been in love ever since.
Up until just a few weeks ago, I was still on the Blogger platform and Keyword Planner made it easy to figure out what keywords I should be using to optimize for SEO. Now that I’ve switched over to WordPress, the Yoast plugin significantly helps, but it’s still not 100% perfect.
For the purpose of this post, we’re going to use the keyword ‘bacon’. Who doesn’t love bacon? In Yoast, if I just type bacon, it gives some searches, and while you might think this is the order that most people search, the Keyword Planner gives a completely different view.
So let’s chat first about how you use Keyword Planner. When you go to Google Adwords (you may need to first log-in to your Google account), click on Tools, then Keyword Planner, then Search for New. Google Adwords is actually to set up ads for potential customers, but we are only talking about the Keyword Planner for SEO in posts here.
You will then wants to type in your search word(s) and check your filters. You may want to compare a specific date range, add a different language, or target country, depending on where your readers are located.
When the keyword planner first searches for your term(s) you will see two things. How many people searched for your term on an average monthly basis depending on your date range. For this particular keyword, you’ll see that for the past 12 months, on average, “bacon” is searched for 90,500 times a month. This is actually a lot lower than I expected for bacon. The search is loaded by Keyword (by relevance), but click on Avg. Monthly Searches to order the keywords by the number of times they are searched.
Once you click that, you will see that most people are searching for a variation of “bacon in the oven”. If you focus on “bacon”, you should absolutely have a post that covers this and use one or multiple of the top three variations within your post. There’s nothing that says that you can’t use more than one keyword, but try to use the main one as many times as naturally possible. You will also get other ideas on what people are searching for in order to do future posts. So maybe your first post is about how to cook bacon in the oven, but next week you also might want to do a post about bacon wrapped chicken, and make sure that again you using “bacon in the oven” within your post.
As you can see in the first image, if you are using Yoast “bacon wrapped dates” shows second, making you think that is more searched than others, but according to Google Adwords, it’s actually the 9th most searched terms relating to bacon. It’s important to look at both in my opinion when learning how to use keyword planner.
Lastly, play around with your date ranges. When I opened the date from 12 months to 24 months, you can see that most people are searching for “bacon” during November to January. You want to make sure that if you are using specific keywords for your site on a regular basis (which you should be), that you are using these optimal times to push both new and old content.
I know this was a basic overview of how to use Keyword Planner within Google Adwords, but I truly hope that it helped. Make sure that you have a specific set of keywords that you regularly use on your site and then for each post you should be using specific keywords to optimize your site to show up in Google search engines.
This post is part of our Blogger Tips, Tricks, and Resources series. You can learn more about this series, learn how you can submit a question to be answered, or learn about how you can submit a guest post to be included in this series by viewing our Introduction to Blogger Tips, Tricks, and Resources Post.
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Michelle @ Sunshine and Hurricanes.com says
September 22, 2016 at 9:53 pmI’m a big fan of the keyword planner, too! It really makes SEO easier and has changed the way I treat my post formatting and titles.