In short: there are five sources of keywords — Keyword Planner, your own website, your competitors, Google autocomplete and your real search terms — and the best by far is the last one: searches that have already cost you money. Keyword Planner is for discovering and inspiring, not for deciding: its volumes are grouped and rounded.
You know what a keyword is and which intent you are after. Now you have to find them. There are five sources, each with its own use — and one official tool, the Planner, which is useful provided you know what it is not telling you.
Source 1 · What is Keyword Planner really for?
It lives under Tools → Planning. It has two modes:
- Discover new keywords: you type in products, services or your URL and it returns ideas with approximate monthly volume, competition and a CPC range.
- Get search volume and forecasts: you paste in your list and it tells you how much it is searched for and what you could expect in clicks and cost.
The good part: it is free, it comes from Google and it covers any sector. The traps:
- The volume is a rounded monthly range, it lumps variants together and it falls short on the long tail. A keyword "with 10-100 searches" can be your best source of customers.
- "Competition" refers to advertisers, not to SEO difficulty — and it is a coarse indicator (low/medium/high).
- The ideas are broad by design: it will suggest keywords from every intent. Filter them with the criteria from the previous lesson.
- With no active spend in the account, it shows ranges instead of figures.
Use it to size things up (is there demand? what will it cost?) and to discover ways of saying it that had not occurred to you. Do not use it as your final list.
Source 2 · How do you get keywords from your own website?
Every page of your website is a potential ad group: categories, services, flagship products, FAQs. And more valuable still: how customers ask you over the phone or by email. Those phrases are literal search terms. Ask whoever answers the phone: "what exactly do they say when they ring?".
Source 3 · How do you look at competitors without copying them?
Search Google for your own keywords and look at which ads come up: your competitors' headlines reveal which intents they are bidding on. In the Planner you can enter a competitor's URL to pull out ideas. Careful: copying their list means copying their mistakes too.
Source 4 · What does Google autocomplete tell you?
Type your keyword into Google and look at the suggestions (they are real, frequent searches) and, at the bottom of the page, the "Related searches" and the "People also ask" block. This is the long tail in its purest form, in the users' exact language.
Source 5 · Why are your own search terms the best source?
Once the campaign has been running for a few weeks, the search terms report is the only source that shows intent alongside results: what people typed, how much it cost and whether it converted. Terms that convert and are not yet keywords ought to be. The whole of lesson 5 is about this.
How do you decide whether a keyword is worth it?
Four questions, in this order:
| Question | If the answer is... |
|---|---|
| What intent does it have? | Informational → discard (or make it a negative). Transactional/commercial → carry on |
| Is it my product? | If you sell kitchen taps, «shower tap» is not yours even though it is a tap |
| What volume does it have? | Low is not bad: the long tail converts. Zero is zero (Google will flag it as "low search volume" and it will do nothing) |
| What is the estimated CPC? | Compare it with what a customer is worth: if a click costs €4 and you convert 1 in 20, the customer costs €80 — is that worth it? |
That last question is what separates the professional: a CPC only means something compared with the value of the conversion. An expensive keyword can be the most profitable one if it converts well.
How do you go from the list into the account?
With the list judged, group by intent (the three-step method from Module 2) and add few keywords per group, in exact or phrase match to start with (next lesson). Keep the doubtful candidates to one side: the search terms report will decide for you in a few weeks.
💡 Ninja trick: a mature account does not research keywords "now and again": it does it every week and automatically, by reading the search terms. The Suite's negative keyword scripts do both halves of the job — they propose the converting terms as new keywords and cut the ones that spend without converting — and leave the result in a spreadsheet where all you do is approve with a checkbox.
What you should remember
- Five sources: the Planner, your website/business, competitors, autocomplete and real search terms. The last one is the best.
- The Planner is for sizing up and discovering, not for your final list: rounded volume, broad ideas.
- Judge by intent → is it my product → volume → CPC versus customer value.
- Few keywords, well grouped, at the start; the search terms report grows the list with data.