Google Keyword tool

- [Narrator] The Google keywords tool is a great tool that you can utilize to help you to identify how many searches per month a particular keyword is getting. And it can also give you keyword suggestions as well. So this is a free tool that Google provides for you and you should be utilizing this as the first port of call when doing some of your keyword research. So as you can see, I'm on ads.google.com at the moment. And here is where you can set up your Google keywords to account. One of the important things to note is that the Google keywords tool is actually it was built with the mindset of those people who are utilizing the Google ads platform. So even though this course relates to search engine optimization, you have to kind of have a Google ads account in order to use the Google keywords tool, now that doesn't mean you have to be running ads on Google, but you at least have to set up an account. So you can either sign in if you already have a Google ads account, and if you don't, you can go to the keyword planner and it will take you to this page where you should be able to either switch Google accounts or if you're new to Google ads, then you can create your Google ads account. So during this setup process is going to take you through different steps. And in order to kind of utilize the Google keywords tool, you don't want to answer any of these steps. So what you want to do is come down here and switch to expert mode. And then it's going to ask you to select your goal, and again, you're going to want to skip this step and you want to create an account without a campaign and now it's going to ask you to submit your business information. So your billing country, your time zone and your currency, make sure you select the country and the time zone and the currency that you want, because you may not be able to change this after the fact. And once you've done this, you can then click submit. Then you should be finished creating your account and you can go ahead and explore your account. And you should see an option that says tools and settings, when you click on that, you should see your keyword planner underneath planning and here is where you can utilize the Google keywords tools. So as you can see, you have discover new keywords here, and you also have get search volume and forecasts. So I tend to use this one here which is discovering new keywords. So if you click on it, you can see it expands out and you can utilize this by typing in a keyword that potentially you want to optimize your website for and this can give you some more data. So let's say for example, you sold trainers on your website, you might type trainers and get results. And as you can see, it shows you your keyword and how many searches per month that keyword gets. You should also see the competition here as well. This one says high, you don't have to worry too much about that because that is not search competition, that is paid ads competition. So, as I mentioned this tool is predominantly for Google ads users. So you can see if you wanted to bid for this keyword, that is a potentially higher competitive keyword and you can see what the top range and the low range bids are for this particular keyword if again, you are trying to do Google ads but it also gives you keyword ideas as well. So what you can do is you can come up here and you can expand this so you can see the keywords a little bit better and this will show you more related ideas for keywords that you might want to optimize your website for as well. An important thing to note is this has given me data based on the settings that I have up here. So as you can see, this is the data based on United Kingdom, but I can click on that and I can change my target so I can enter if I wanted the United States or I can also select it to just be worldwide as well. If I just delete these targeting locations, you can also select your language as well and your networks too. So you can just choose Google or you can choose Google and search partners and also you can change the date range as well. So at the moment, this is the last 12 months but you can kind of change that and make that your own as well. So, the Google keywords tool gives you a great overview of how many searches per month a particular keyword gets as well as given you some great keyword ideas. Now, obviously this is a free tool and it's owned by Google. So it's probably the most accurate keyword research tool out there on the market. The only downside is it doesn't really tend to give you some great long tail keywords, but it still is a great option and it's still a resource that you should be utilizing.