Google Ads Keyword Research: Step-by-Step Tutorial (2025)

Choose the wrong keywords in your Google Ads account and you may never end up making money. Choose the right keywords and you might end up with a money machine spitting cash in your bank account. Each and every day I am going to show you how to do keyword research the right way. And just a heads up, I keep it very practical and simple because that's what we believe it should be. It's the same process that we're using here at Grow My Ads, My agency, a seven figure agency. We do not overcomplicate this process. So I'm going to show you a very simple way of doing keyword research. It's probably not what you think and I'm going to end up showing you how to find the gold and find the money terms for your business so you end up with a money printer and not a money pit. So let's go ahead and dive in. Okay, I have a quick and easy sheet here on keyword research. I'm going to be diving into an actual Google Ads account and doing a keyword research process. So just stay tuned for that. But I want to go over a few details with you before we dive in. So number one is just fundamentals. You need to ask yourself before you even go into the keyword research process, what is your goal and what is your budget? So what are you actually looking for here? I've talked to prospects before where they're like, well, we have a thousand dollar per month budget and then they want to target 5,000 different keywords. How does that make any sense? It doesn't. And you don't need to do that, especially in today's age with Google Ads and automation and smart bidding and everything else. I'm going to show you all of this. So go after high intent terms. We're going to talk about keyword intent in a second and start with seed terms. Then you want to expand from there. So a seed term could be something like pet friendly sofa. This is exactly the keyword research I'm actually going to do in this video because I actually need to do some keyword research on pet friendly sofa. So I'm going to go through that process with you in this video. All right. Keyword intent. You've got different intent terms out there. So you have informational, that's someone who's just literally looking up information they're not probably ready to buy. You've got navigational. This you don't really have to worry too much about. A lot of these are just going to end up negative keywords. But this would be something like Chase credit card login. This is someone who's searching for, for a specific page. A lot of times it's login Pages or maybe FAQs or membership sort of pages that websites might have. So this is an area you would not want to be bidding on. Same with informational, at least at the early stages of an account. Then you have commercial. So now we're starting to get to where some of the money's at. This is more middle of the fun funnel traffic. So these include like category level terms or comparison terms. I'm going to give you some examples of that. Then you have transactional. These are bottom of the funnel. These are the terms that you must go after to start making money right away. These can include brand and product specific terms. So as an example here we have difference between OLED and qled. This is someone who is starting the process of purchasing a TV, but they don't know. I see OLEDs, I see QLEDs. What is the difference? So this is more that informational keyword intent right here. I do not give you an example of navigational for this because there's no need to. You can avoid navigational altogether. Second one, LG OLED versus Samsung oled. This is now commercial, right? So it's middle of the funnel. This is someone who's exploring the difference between an LG OLED and a Samsung. So they started here, right? They were wondering what is the difference between OLED and QLED through that process, somehow they have now decided OLEDs for them, at least based off of this next search, right, where it's LG versus Samsung. So now they're like, what's the best brand? So they're still researching, but there's commercial intent now behind it because they're, they're trying to make their decision, at least in this search between an LG and a Samsung. What is the difference? What is better? Probably looking at reviews, et cetera. Then you've got 55 inch LG OLED C2TV. All right, someone who's typing this in is ready to buy. And this is exactly the transactional term that you're looking for because this is going to convert the highest. And this is where you're going to start generating actual sales and revenue from your account. If you started top of the funnel with informational or even sometimes in this middle of the funnel, what you could end up with is a lot of cheap traffic that just burns your credit card and does not end up generating any sales. So go after high intent terms first and then during your research process, start with seed terms of those high intent terms and then go from there. So pet Friendly sofa is going to be my seed term that I'll be using. And in that case it's not quite transactional. It's definitely more commercial. It's someone who doesn't quite know they do want pet friendly sofa, but they're definitely exploring still. So I'm going to show you how I would go about creating an ad group or campaign for that. All right, so keyword research tools. Believe it or not, I actually start with just Google Search. You plug in what you think your customer is searching for your product or service. Just brainstorm as if you were the customer. That's usually the best way to go. Google's going to give you related search terms. Those are perfect to figure out what other searches are related to the search that I just put in to Google and then you start sort of building your seed list from there. The other thing, Google Ads account data. If you're running Google Ads already, there's going to be a ton of search term data inside of your an account. Some of those search terms you may not have added as keywords inside of your search campaigns yet. So that's another great way of actually using just free free tools that you already have and are running to expand your keyword research, their search console. So if you are getting a lot of organic traffic, you can hop into your search console account. You can review the search term data there and see what searches are or keywords are doing well organically. Should I be getting exposure on the paid ad side for those keywords as well? So another great, great tool that's absolutely free and a lot of gold could be found there. Then you have the Google Keyword Planner tool. This is what I'm going to be showing you here in a second and actually doing some keyword research using the Keyword Planner tool. This is totally free. I will have a full video on how to use the Google Keyword Planner tool. But in this video you're going to get enough information on how to use it for or a simple Google keyword research process. Then there's Chat, GPT or Bard. So Google's Bard, both of those are great areas as well. Plug in your seed keywords and ask for it to give you other keyword ideas. And so another great area of just expanding your keyword research list. Then there's SpyFu. SpyFu is a competitor tool. You can see what competitors are bidding on. It's got to take the data with a grain of salt. But there's another area of expanding if you're doing some competitive research in regards to what areas of coverage are my competitors bidding on within Google Ads and are there any areas here that there's overlap with us or maybe we're missing some keywords that they're actually targeting. SpyFu is a paid software, so not free. And that's why I put it at the bottom. I do not believe you have to pay for tools to, to do a lot of this keyword research. We've made millions of dollars from Google Ads and in most cases we haven't really needed to use a lot of paid tools. Now we do have a lot of these tools paid for because it makes sense for an agency of our size to to have some of these tools and paid subscriptions. But, but for the most part I don't use paid tools. In rare cases I will, or if I'm doing in depth competitor research. But a lot of times I am able to do really in depth keyword research just by using these other free tools, as I mentioned. So Google search, your own account data, search console, keyword planner tool, ChatGPT or Bard. Okay, so let's go in and hop into a real account. I'm gonna start doing some keyword research. All right, let's start doing some keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner tool. So you're going to start here with the discover new keywords section. And for this one, I want Pet friendly sofa. So we're going to start with that keyword. If you had more, you could add those. You can also change the location. I am just targeting us. So I'm fine there. And I am just targeting English as well. Now you can start with a website too. This gets a little too. There's too many terms usually that get thrown your way. And so in this particular case, I want to only expand on those searches for pet friendly sofas. That is what I'm trying to scale for this account. And so I'm starting with pet friendly sofa. If I just started, if my C term was sofa, it would be too crazy. And so you have to, you have to narrow in on. Exactly. All right, what am I, what am I after again? That's the fundamentals. What is your goal? What is your budget? And in this case, my goal is to scale pet friendly sofas. So or at least start advertising on terms related to pet friendly sofa. So I type that in. Now it gives me this sort of data dump. Right. I'm going to show you how to go through this and then actually how to start applying it to adding keywords to your account. So here we have us, we have English. This section here is going to give you Google and Google search partners. I recommend just having this set to Google. This is going to give you essentially the last years of data, which is fine. You'll notice there's a bit of an uptick here in the fall, which makes sense. But no real massive change in volume. Obviously that changes like watch if I do Christmas trees, this will spike. You'll, you'll notice the volume spikes here. So it's dead. And then all of a sudden October, November, December, it skyrockets. That makes sense. Right, so this is nothing more here than showing you volume trends over the last year. So let me go back to pet friendly sofa. Now my goal is I want to start finding keywords to start targeting in the account to expand on selling our pet friendly sofas. So I've got 214 available keyword ideas here. That's not terrible. Sometimes you'll type in, you know, if I just type in sofa, this is probably going to give me a thousand. Yes. So this is 2000 keywords, 1700 keywords available. Just too much. Right. So then you really have to go through a ton of weeding out and refining the terms here. So we have pet friendly sofa. Boom. Adding that. And then I'm going to start chopping away at this a little bit. So first off, you don't need anything that's less than 30 searches because it's normally going to get tagged low search volume anyways. So. So I usually start by average monthly searches must be greater than or equal to 30. So that's going to cut away some of those terms. So that right there has refined it down a little bit. I've got 125 now out of 214. So that cleaned it up a little bit. Right. Then I'm going to start looking at this refine keywords section here. This is going to show like there's brand and non brand. Well, here are other brands. There's Ikea, Joybird, Burrow, Crate and Barrel, West Elm. These are competitors. I don't want any of those terms. So I am going to uncheck that. That's going to clean up some of my terms as well. Then we've got leather in here. I do not have any leather sofas so we're going to uncheck leather. So that's going to notch it down a little bit. We have animal and then we have Others. Okay, so that's cool. So now I have a bit of a refreshing find list here. However, looking at that, I noticed there is volume for dogs and then cats. Okay, that makes sense. Now to me, I don't want to actually mix those because I want my ads to talk to cat owners differently than dog owners. So now I'm starting to visualize, okay, I definitely am going to want to do a cat friendly sofa ad group and then a dog and then probably a generic pet friend friendly where someone's searching but we don't know what type of pet they have. And this is all it takes. It doesn't take much. So we have pet friendly, generic. And then I'm going to have, I'm going to space it dog. And then I'm going to have cat. So now I'm going to come in here. I've already refined my keywords and now I'm going to start filtering this even further. So now keyword contains. Let's just do dog. So here are all the dog terms, right. And I'm going to review some of these real quick. Again, I don't have, I can't do leather. So actually now these are keywords and then I'm going to add a negative. So you do negative keyword research during this process as well. It's just gonna add to the efficiency. So here I would have leather and then I'm looking at volume. And so best couch for dog owners, dog friendly sofa. And so you can download, you could actually go in and just download these keyword ideas into a Google sheet for this one. For this purpose. I'm just gonna start actually. So couch material, that's pretty informational. I don't quite want that. We could do best couch for dog owners. That's fine. And then dog proof sofas, that's pretty good. Best dog friendly. Again, that's that this term is very similar to that. So with Google's match types, I have a full video on keyword match types. This would pick up some of that traffic. So I don't need to worry too much about that as long as I have the match types correct here. But you don't have to go in and add every single variation in here, especially when you're testing. The goal is I have no data on these keywords yet. So I just want to go after dog friendly sofa terms, cat friendly sofa terms, and I'm going to have generic. And then once I add them to the account, start bidding on them, then I'll know if they're going to Work or not. But I can't make judgments there. But I don't need to add all 25 dog terms to this column just yet. It doesn't make sense. So if it's related like best couch for dog owners and then best dog friendly sofas, those are related. I'm going to just target this one with the most volume. So that has 1900 searches and best dog friendly sofas had 140. This will pick up searches for this as well due to how match types work. So I don't need to worry about adding every single little variation. This then we don't have leather dog friendly sectional couches. So a lot of these are basically pretty similar. So I don't need. Because I don't want to go after like fabrics yet. That's, that's just a bit too high up. So I really want someone who's looking to buy the furniture. Fabric can be someone looking up. Dog friendly sofa fabric is potentially just trying to find what is the best fabric for a dog owner. And so I don't want to expand there yet. I really am just trying to get some good sales from sofas. So I have basically a couple terms here. Dog friendly sofa, dog proof sofas. Best couch for dog owners. It's pretty good to start. And then I'm going to do cat now it's probably going to be very similar. Whoops. Not dog, cat. So here we have cat friendly couches, cat friendly sofas. I'm actually just going to roll with sofas to keep it. And then I bet you're going to have best cat friendly. Yep. So it's going to be very similar to what dog is. It's just the volume is a bit different. And then so I'm just going to do cat proof sofas as well. All right, so we've got all of that. So we are good. No additional negatives. I'm seeing that I'd want to add from that. So we're good. Now I'm going to say does not contain cat or dog. There we go. So it does not contain cat or dog. So now we have pet friendly sofa. We've got pet friendly couch. I am actually going to add these both. There is some volume differences there. The thing about furniture is there, there is a difference between a couch, a sofa and a sectional. But a lot of people search as if it's all the same thing. So I have to sometimes let the data prove that. So in this case I would actually keep these in the same ad group and then as I get data on how they're behaving then I would make changes from there. But for now, my keyword research, I'm going to just keep them in this generic column. Then we have pet resistant couch. That's not bad. It's pretty similar to like pet friendly, but I am going to add it just to see if there's any behavioral differences there or even the match types there. Best couches for pets. So you see how it has. So there's cat. Does not contain cat. Cats and dogs. I'm going to add the plural versions of that because it is adding some of that. I am going to. I want sectional sofas in there too. Oh, sleeper. We don't do sleeper. So there's a negative. No sleeper sofa. Again, leather is not something we do. I don't want material. Velvet. I do not have velvet. And again, a lot of fabric terms and then we've got the volume here. I don't need that. Fabric, fabric, fabric. Best couch for pet owners. Okay, cool. I think that is going to take care of most of it. I don't really need to go too crazy. So I've been able to get a few negatives added to this. I've got now pet friendly generic and I've got some dog terms here and then I also have some cat terms that I'm able to add. Then if you want to start looking at can I even add all of these or should I start with just one or all three? That's going to depend on what your budget is. Right. And so as part of what I'm looking at here too is you see these top of the page bids and then low range bids here. So this is showing how much it's going to cost per click to actually bid on some of these terms. So at the high end I'm looking at 559. At the low end, $1.32. Usually I just take sort of the number in the median to give me a bit of an estimate on cost per clicks for these terms. Because usually in the beginning I'm not going to be at the top and I also don't want to be at the very bottom. So again, sort of the median of those is where I project my average CPCS will be. Now you can use a forecast here. So in this forecast it's going to give you kind of like what it could look like. So I'm going to go into this forecast and I'm going to add. Let's just start with my pet friendly terms, generic. Then if I go into the Forecast. I'm going all saved keywords here. This is going to start giving me what the potential is. Now there's some settings here we have bid strategy. So it's set to max conversion. We have match type. Again match type is very important. Full video on match type. Go check that out. For this case I'm going to use phrase and then it's going to show me here forecast over the next year top locations. You're always going to see California, Texas, New York and Florida in most cases, just because those are the most populated states, it's going to show you some device percent. Looks like mobile is going to be very high. That's very normal. And then here, this is the actual forecast. So this is saying estimated conversion rate. Well, I'm going to use a 2% and then my value is about $1,000 per conversion. So now it's saying all right, your plan of those keywords can get you 17 conversions for $650 with a 21 average dollar average daily budget. So that is probably unlikely. I'm going to go ahead and edit this. So this, when you hit average daily budget, this is going to change then and it's going to show you what the amount of conversions you could get based off of that. So now I'm actually going to go to conversion value it's saying I could get. So it taps out. Looks like average daily budget of 470. It's going to tap out. That's the max volume that's available for those keywords that I've added. And this is for December 2023 based off of the settings here. So you can actually play around with that. You could do January and expand further if you want. So you can change the time frame in the future, not obviously in the past since it is a forecast. So this is now saying, hey, at a 2% conversion rate with a value per conversion of 1,000, your plan can get 62 conversions for $14,000 in monthly spend. So that's an average of $470 per day. This is at a very high click through rate. It's Giving me average CPC is about 470. That's towards the higher end. Again, this bid strategy is set to max conversion and it's showing me sort of the average CPAs and what the ROAS could be here too. Now the forecast tool. Take it with a grain of salt. This is something I don't even show clients because I do not see this ever really being the reality. However, it gives you some idea of potential volume like Where's Google kind of maxing out volume here in regards to cost? So, you know, it's saying I could spend up to $25,000 per month. So sometimes I do look at that and I'm like, what's the maximum of my daily budget? It says I could spend. What would that actually get me? You'll notice it's showing me at the highest end of average CPC when I do that. So sometimes I do like to look at that. Like what, what is Google saying? The total impression sort of for these keywords, what's the total cost I could be spending on these if. If return on ad spend or any goals didn't mean anything to me. So a lot of times I like to look at that. But in regards to like actually forecasting results, it doesn't do that great of a job. You really have to just start bidding on your keywords, start generating data, start optimizing around that data, then you're going to get your results. So I do not. I personally don't like projecting or forecasting too much and I'm very upfront with clients about that because I just don't see a perfect case of it. Forecasting is unbelievably hard for anything. And so to forecast Google Ads gets pretty hard too. Their own tool does an okay job of at least giving you some hypothetical situations, but the reality is find good keywords with high intent, add them to your account, then start bidding on them, then start getting the results, then start optimizing from those results. So you can use this though, to give you a bit of an idea. Okay, there you go. So you saw me, I was able to grab some really good terms to start for pet friendly generic. I didn't even think about like specific dog and cat ad groups. And sure enough, in the keyword research, oh yeah, there's a lot of volume specific to dog friendly couches as well as cat friendly couches. So now I have nice segmented themed dog ad groups that I'll be building and also themed cat friendly couch ad groups along with the pet friendly generic ad group there. So you saw me how I was able to go in and quickly grab some of those terms using the keyword planner. You saw how I was reviewing some of that data, how I was able to filter to make that process very quick and easy and where I didn't have to go through 50,000 different searches. You saw some of the data I was looking at. You saw how you can use the forecast tool. Also I was able to grab some nice negative keywords from that process as well. So keyword research does not have to be extremely hard. It can be super, super easy. Like I just showed you pro tips to leave you before I end this video. Less is more. You do not need to go too crazy. You saw I I'm going to start with just a nice little handful of keywords there. I'm going to start getting some data, especially the way keyword match types behave today. I don't need to jam 100 keywords into an ad group, so that's one of my others. Don't load an ad group with hundreds of keywords. I try to condense as much as possible. Usually if you were to look at our structure, you're going to find maybe a max of 20 keywords inside of an ad group. Once you go beyond that, it's not a hard rule, but once you go beyond that, usually you're you're finding areas that you could split off into another segmented ad group that would have a higher click through rate because you could create an ad that resonates better for that. So not a hard rule, but I like to look at it. If I'm at over 20 keywords, is there an area here that I should be segmenting to be able to create an ad that's going to resonate better with those searches? So don't go in and load up ad groups with hundreds of keywords. It's not necessary today. Less is more. Add Negative Keywords While you're doing your keyword research, you can bang out two things at once. Then you saw I was able to gather a couple negative keywords there. It's going to save me money in the long run and I didn't have to spend money on those to find out oh hey, these should be added as negatives. I did that within the process. So efficiency from being able to do it all in one go. Start with exact and phrase match when testing to do not start with broad again. I've mentioned it several times in this video. I have a full keyword match type video breaking down everything you need to know about keyword match types. But start with exact and phrase test Dynamic search ads if you have the budget. That is a great mining tool to find keywords. It almost does keyword research for you. So if you have the budget, I also like to test some dynamic search ads for that as well. So for the pet friendly I would be focusing on my pet friendly sofa pages and allowing the dynamic search ads to start generating some keyword research for me. Then test long Tail broad keywords if you have the budget. So if you do have some money to spend, you got a little wiggle room and you're willing to be a little looser in regards to your match types. You don't have to only start with Exact and Phrase match. You can sprinkle in a couple Long tail broad keywords. So in my case I might add the Broad match keyword Pet Friendly Sectional sofas as a broad and see what that's able to generate for me. But again, most cases I'm starting with Exact and Phrase match. You now know how to do keyword research. You can do it completely free just like I did so you don't need paid tools. It doesn't have to be over complicated and take, you know, weeks of research to do. It's fairly simple process, especially with how Google keywords behave today. I hope you found great value from that. Go ahead in the description below if you're running Performance Max campaigns, we are launching a brand new free Performance Max course. I will have the link in the description go sign up for that. It took me months to build. There's 23 plus videos. There's a full notion doc on everything you need to know know about Performance Max campaigns and how to make the most money from them. Based off of our experience, we've generated over 50 million in revenue from Performance Max campaigns across our client portfolio. So check that out. If you have questions about this video. I know it's super long, put them in the comments. I will do my best to answer those or someone from my team love to interact with you guys when I have the time or my team has the time to actually go filter through some of those comments. So any questions go ahead, just throw them in the comment section. We will do our best to get to them and I hope to see you on the next video. Thanks.