Google Keyword Planner Tutorial for 2022
In this tutorial Aaron Young, a self‑described 15,000‑hour Google Ads veteran, walks viewers through a complete, cost‑free keyword research workflow using Google’s own Keyword Planner. He begins by advising a quick manual brainstorm of 10‑20 seed keyword ideas in a Google Doc, then shows how to paste those seeds into the Planner’s “Discover New Keywords” tool, adjust location settings, and optionally add a website for additional suggestions. Aaron explains the Planner’s key metrics—average monthly searches, trend graphs, competition level, and top‑of‑page bid ranges—emphasizing that trends are the most reliable indicator. He demonstrates selecting promising keywords, adding extra ideas suggested by the tool, and exporting the resulting list to a CSV file. Using the exported data, he introduces the “one‑keyword‑theme” method: each ad group contains a single, tightly‑focused keyword theme, organized under product‑specific campaigns (e.g., iPhone, Samsung, Pixel). This structure aligns ad copy and landing pages with the exact search intent, improving quality scores and CPC efficiency. Aaron also covers the Planner’s forecast feature for budgeting, advises against creating campaigns directly from the Planner, and provides a free Google Ads Optimization checklist. The video concludes by directing viewers to a separate tutorial on writing high‑click‑through ad copy.
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It's simple. If you want success with Google Ads, you first need to complete your keyword research in the right way. And the good news is, is that you don't need to waste money on expensive third party keyword tools. Because the best keyword tool to use for Google Ads is Google's very own Keyword Planner. And in this video, I'm going to take you through the exact step by step process that you need to complete in order to find the right keywords for your Google Ads campaign. And just in case you're wondering, my name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And I've been running successful Google Ads since 2010. And the reason for why I'm so passionate about Google Ads is because it has helped me grow my own businesses, which has allowed me to live the lifestyle that me and my family want to live. So if you want to know how you can use Google Ads to create successful Google Ads campaigns for your business or your product, stick around and watch this video. So right now, let's get into your keyword research for Google Ads. Now, it may come as a surprise to you, but the very first important step for completing your very own Google Ads keyword research is actually doesn't even happen in the Google Ads Keyword Planner tool. And that's because the best way to start your keyword research is to open up a Google Doc or a Word document and just quickly write down 10 or 20 different keyword ideas that you would use if you were going to search for your own product or business on Google. And the reason for why this is such an important first step is because if that is the keyword inquiry that you would use when you're searching for your product on Google, it's highly likely that your potential customers will would also be using those exact same keyword phrases and search terms when they're looking for a product. So this is what your first step would look like. I've got my Google Doc here, and in today's example, we're gonna be looking for some different keywords that we could use if we were running an online store that sells mobile phone accessories. And you can see very, very quickly here, and this took me one or two minutes to do is I just opened up a Google Doc, as I said, you could also do this in a Word document. And then I just quickly wrote down about nine or ten different keyword searches that that I would use. Now remember, in this step, we're just looking for the main keyword themes. We don't need to go into all the different variations because that is what we'll be using the Keyword Planner tool for. But this is just a really quick, simple starting process so that we're giving enough information to Google so that it can complete the keyword research for us. And then once you have your Google Doc ready with the keyword ideas, I want you to go over into Google Ads. And then when you're in Google Ads, you need to go into this Tools and Settings section and then we're going to click on the Keyword Planner. And then from here we want to use the Discover New Keywords option. Now the reason for why we want to use that, because as the name suggests, is that we're actually using the Google Keyword Planner to try and find some new keyword ideas that we may not have thought about. So then you click on Discover New Keywords and then from there it's just a matter of going back into your Google Doc, selecting all of these keywords, just pressing copy and then pasting them directly into this section. Now, we'll also note that if you wanted to, I've just set this for Australia, which is the country that I'm currently in, but if you wanted to go through and add in some different locations or change the location, you can do that in this section. And then from there there is also an option if you want to add in your own website. Now this is not required, but if you were to add in your website is that Google would then also do a quick scan of your website to see if there was some other related keywords that it could recommend for you. And then from there we just quickly press get results and then from there Google will start displaying its results. Now I just want to show you the different parts of the screen that you need to be paying attention to. Now this graph shows you the trend line for the last 12 months of the average monthly searches. That these search terms which if you selected up here, have been getting within Australia or the location that you have selected. And then they also do separate it out so it gives you the total and then also the mobile. And then when you go down into the table section, this first section is all of the keywords that we provided so you can see than through here. And then this breaks down the average monthly searches. It then goes through the trends for the last three months and the year on year. And then it does go into some other factors that you may want to look at, which is mainly the competition. And this is rated in low, medium or high. And it gives you an indication of how many other competitors are competing on your same keywords. And then from there it gives us a breakdown of the top of page bid and also the top of page bid high range. Now, the difference between these two is that the low range top of page bid would be talking to positions through three and four, and the top of page bid high range would be talking to those positions one and two. And that's why you're seeing a bit of a variance between the average cost per click for those positions three and four and also those positions one and two. Now, one thing I do want to stress, with all of these metrics, including the average searches and also including the bids, these are all just very indicative. And quite often when I've gone through the keyword research and then gone through to the actual campaign and, and have been running that campaign for 30 or 60 days, you can actually sometimes see quite a big difference between these initial numbers and then what actually happens in your account. But I don't want you to be worried about that because for me, when it comes to keyword research, the only thing that I'm really looking at is I'm looking at the trends. And then from there we've got some different keyword ideas, and this is just breaking down some different keyword ideas that we didn't type into the keywords that we provided. So what I would do is I'll then just go through and start selecting the different keywords which I think I want to be using in my campaign. Obviously, I want to be using all of those initial keywords that I wrote. And then as we go into the different keyword ideas, you can actually see that Google is starting to give us some different keyword ideas which are a longer tail or more specific and give some more detail. So, for example, if you're only selling iPhone 12 cases, you'd be much better to target these longer term phrases as opposed to the very broad iPhone cases. And then from there it's just a matter of us going down and selecting these different keywords which we want to include in our keyword research. Now, as you can see, I've actually gone through and selected 34 different keyword themes that we could potentially use in our campaign. Now, I'm happy with those 34 keywords that I've selected, but you can actually see, if you wanted to, you can also use this top section up here. And this is Google giving you some different keyword themes that it hasn't recommended on. And if you wanted to add any of these, it would just be a matter of clicking on these individual search terms and then it would automatically update these new keyword ideas. So then from there I will always go through and add a new ad group. And then we want to go through and we want to click Add keywords. And then when you see this little notification in the bottom, you can actually see that your keywords have been added to your plan. And then from there, the next step is we want to go into our forecast. Now, this is a forecasting tool that you can decide to use. So let's just say that, you know you have a budget of only $50 a day, you can type that in into 50, and then Google will actually update these forecasts. Or if you only had a budget of $20 a day, you could change that to 20, and then Google would once again update these forec. Now, the next step is actually really important. My recommendation is that you don't use this create campaign button. And the reason for that is that I prefer to download these plan historical metrics into a CSV file. And the reason for why I don't create that campaign straight from the Google keyword planner and why I download my keywords into a CSV file is because a very important step that you need to do in your keyword research is to go through and actually break your different keyword themes into individual ad groups using the one keyword theme method. And this is a very important method that is going to save you a lot of money, especially when it comes down into your cost per clicks. So the amount that you pay per click. But it is also going to be setting up your campaign for success to make sure that you can get those highest quality scores click through ratios and conversion rates. So now let's go back into that screen share so that I can show you what I actually do once I've actually downloaded the the keywords that I've selected. And what I want to do is I want to break that keyword structure into my one keyword theme. And this is what that would actually look like is that we have our total Google Ads account. And then from there we will break our keywords into different campaigns. And then underneath each of those campaigns, we would actually break them into individual ad groups. And these are our individual keyword themes. Now, the benefit for this and the reason for why this is so important is because we want all of our keywords to only have one keyword theme so that we can actually match the ad text or the ad copy with those individual keywords. And send them through to the relevant landing pages, which are going to be most relevant to the individual keyword that the person has searched. Now, you may remember with my initial keyword research, we had some keywords around iPhone products, Samsung products, and also the Google pixel phone. Now, those three core different products would actually be the making of our campaigns. So we would have our iPhone campaign, our Samsung campaign, and then we would also have our Google pixel campaign. And then with these individual ad groups, we would not only break them down into phone cases and charging docs, but we would also break these down into iPhone 12 cases, iPhone 11 cases, or iPhone 13 cases. And the reason for that is so that if someone was to actually search for an iPhone 12 case, we would take them to the landing page which sells iPhone 12 cases, and we'd not take them to the page which sells iPhone 11 cases or iPhone 13 cases. So now we've actually got our downloaded keyword list. What I actually go through now is I want to go through and sort these into different campaigns and ad groups. So what I'll quickly do is I'll quickly go through and add in some extra columns. And now I've now added in a column for your campaign and ad group. Then from there, it's a matter of me going through all of these keywords and breaking them into different campaigns and ad groups so that we can use that one keyword theme method. Now, what I've done here is I've gone through and allocated some different campaigns and ad groups. And what we can do here is just quickly sort our sheet. And then once you've done that, you can actually see that we've got our individual Samsung campaigns, but then they're broken into the different ad groups, whether we're talking about the cases for the S20 or. Or the S21. And same with the Pixel, we've got the different pixel cases, whether it's the Pixel 5 or the 4a, and then into our iPhones, we've got the different ad groups for the charging docks, charging cables, and also the different types of phones that we're offering. So iPhone 13, 12 and 11. And that's how easy it is to complete your Google keyword research using Google's keyword planner to not only find the right type of keywords, but to also structure them in the correct way using that one keyword theme method, so that you've got the correct structure for your campaigns, your ad groups, and your keywords. And by creating that structure, it means that in the future it's going to make it much easier for you to optimize your campaign. And when we're talking about optimizing your campaign, I also want to give you a free gift, which is my Google Ads Optimization checklist. And this is a checklist which lets you know exactly what you need to optimize in your Google Ads account every single day, week and month. And you can get your copy simply by following the link in the description below. Now, after you've completed your Google Ads keyword research, the next important big step is to actually go through and start writing your ad copy. Now, with your ad copy, you want it to be ad copy that people don't only see, but it's also ad copy that people also click through. Go to your website and finish that conversion. And if you go through and watch this video right here, I've shared my top secrets on how you can write ad copy, which is not only going to be seen, but but people are going to click and go through and buy your products or audio services. As always, it's been a pleasure teaching you and I look forward to seeing you in that ad copy teaching that I just gave you.
