PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Wouldn’t it be great if your business website received thousands of visitors each month? Or thousands of visitors per day?

What would that mean for you? It would probably mean far more paying customers. Whether your business has a physical location you want to drive traffic to, like a restaurant, or you provide virtual services like marketing or accounting, you need people discovering your business online.

If your website can show up in Google searches for relevant keywords, you can start capturing these users and growing your business.

To start,  you’ll want to use a Google keyword planner. A tool like this can help you not only discover what keywords you should be using for your website but also which are the most valuable and the easiest to start ranking for.

Wondering what a keyword planner is, and how to start using a Google keyword planner tool right away? Keep reading to find out now.

What are Keywords?

First off, it’s important to have a good understanding of keywords. What are they, and why do you need them?

Keywords are the words or terms that your potential customers are searching for online. When they search for these keywords, you want your website to show up first.

When your website shows up near the top of search results, you will receive more website traffic, and ultimately, more customers.

Let’s say you own a local coffee shop in Atlanta. What would your keywords be? They might include, but aren’t limited to;

• Coffee shop
• Coffee in Atlanta
• Best coffee
• Best coffee shops in Georgia
• Coffee roaster
• Cafe
• Coffee company
• Where to buy coffee beans

And there are plenty more you can come up with. But these are the terms that people are searching for. Whichever coffee company is ranking the highest for these search terms is going to get all the customers.

But how do you find these keywords in the first place? And which ones should you target first with SEO and blog articles?

How to Use a Google Keyword Planner

A keyword planner tool will help you to discover the keywords that are relevant to your business. Whether you use a keyword planner free of charge, or you opt for a paid tool, they will all generally do the same thing. But the paid options will provide some more in-depth information.

To start using a keyword planner, you just need to know a few basic keywords. To start with, this is essentially your product or service. So for your coffee business, you can start by using “coffee shop” as your initial keyword.

Then, the planner will generate tons of related keywords on your behalf. These tools know which keywords are relevant. For example, they know that people who search for coffee shops, cafes, and coffee houses all generally want the same thing; a place to go buy coffee.

On top of the list of new keywords, you’ll get information about each keyword. You’ll get monthly traffic estimates. This is how many people are probably searching for that term each month. The more users searching for that keyword, the more valuable it becomes.

Tools will also show the difficulty rating for ranking for that keyword. If there are a lot of other websites competing for that keyword ranking, then it’s going to be more difficult for you to break in and start ranking for it.

But in general, a planner tool will show you what keywords you should be going after, helping you to develop a solid SEO marketing strategy. You can start using a keyword planner tool for free right here.

Comparing Keywords

So once you start using a keyword planner tool, how do you know what to do with the information? You need to know how to interpret the information and compare the different keywords.

For all the keywords that are generated, you need to decide which ones are most relevant to your business. Let’s look at a coffee example one more time.

Say there are three different keywords, all related to coffee;

• Order coffee online
• Coffee shop near me
• Where does coffee come from?

Each of these is related to coffee, which is your main product and revenue generator. But as a physical coffee shop, that focuses on selling hot, brewed coffee, one keyword is more relevant than the others.

People searching for “order coffee online” aren’t interest in visiting a local coffee shop. They want coffee beans shipped to their door.

And people searching for “where does coffee come from?” aren’t even looking to buy coffee. They are just looking to learn something new.

So out of these keywords, you’d want to focus on “coffee shop near me” as the user’s intention with this keyword is to visit and patronize a local coffee shop.

Once you understand the user intent, you need to compare the number of searches and the keyword difficulty. The sweet spot is a keyword with a high number of monthly searches and low competition. These are hard to find nowadays.

But organize your list of keywords based on these factors so you can determine which keywords to target first.

Using Keywords to Grow Your Business

So you’ve got an extensive list of keywords relevant to your business goals. What can you do with them?

Two things. First, optimize the existing pages on your website with these keywords. That means adding them, exactly as they are being searched, on the relevant pages of your website.

After optimizing your existing pages, it’s time to start blogging so you can add more keyword-rich pages to your website. You want to create blog articles that focus on individual keywords, answering the questions your potential customer has.

Both of these factors are considered on-site SEO. Once you have keyword-rich pages that answer users’ questions, you can focus on off-site SEO, which can help increase the search rankings of these pages.

Making Your Website Work for You

If you are in business, then you need a website. If you want your website to do anything positive for your business, you need to know your keywords. Using a Google keyword planner makes this process much easier, even if you don’t have any SEO knowledge or experience.

Looking for more tips like this? Keep reading other articles on our blog today.