One of the first steps to starting any marketing campaign or optimizing a website is to do keyword research. But which keywords should you target? There are a few easy sources you can immediately draw from to get an idea of what your content should contain.

Google keyword planner

Note: you need to have a Google account in order to use this tool.

In order to discover keywords, get their history, search volume and competition level, I use the Google Keyword Planner. Once logged in, there are three options under the Find new keywords and get search volume data heading to consider. If you just need a starting point, Search for new keywords using a phrase… is a good place to start. Be mindful of selecting a targeted area and a language. Failing to correctly set either field can skew your data.

Location targeting

Start by selecting a target area based on your business requirements. If you’re in the service industry, the location reach would be your service area. If you’re a business that can only ship products to a few states, make sure those are the only ones you’re targeting. Take note of when targeting a city versus targeting a DMA (designated market area). DMA regions tend to group similar demographics together spanning over several cities. An example would be: Jacksonville Florida’s DMA also includes Orlando and Daytona Beach as well.

You can start by typing out the city, state or country or click on the advanced option to see a map. Enter a location and hit Add to see the reach of that market.

Note: if you’re planning on running a PPC campaign with these, you’ll be offered better targeting options once you’re making your campaign, so try and get as close to your target location as possible.

Choosing a keyword source

Once you have your location and language set, you’re ready to start entering keywords. You can either enter a few examples into the text box or find a competitor’s website in Google’s search engine. The idea is to take the competitor’s website domain and put it in the landing page field. What that’ll do is look at their website and give you all the keywords being targeted in their content.

If you’re going to manually enter in keyword ideas, try and stay away from one-word keywords and focus more on three to four word phrases. When ready, click Get ideas.

Segmenting out negative keywords and low search volume

The Google keyword planner will start you out with suggesting Ad group ideas. Since keywords are grouped together based on terms, this tab is great for picking out negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that don’t apply to your business. They could be a service term like “free” or a location term like “Baltimore”, whatever words shouldn’t make your website or ads appear in the search engine. If you’re doing keyword research for content, then keeping track of negative keywords isn’t something needed, but if you’re planning on making a PPC campaign, be sure to add them to the negative keywords list on the left in the Targeting area.

Another helpful tip would be to look at the Customize your search on the left side and select Keyword filters. Under Average monthly searches, type in 20 so that every term being generated has at least 20 search or more each month. Generally, anything with 10 doesn’t generate enough traffic to be consider at this point.

Picking out keywords

After picking out negative keywords and removing all low-volume keywords, it should be simple to go through and see all the most popular terms being searched in Google. Go through the list and add any keywords that are relevant to your plan by hovering over the keyword row and clicking on the blue, arrow button on the right side.

If you’re unsure about a certain keyword or phrase, copy and paste it into Google’s search engine and see if your competition shows up. If they do, then it’s safe to add, if they don’t, you can leave it alone. For PPC campaigns, look to see which keywords are generating ads on Google’s search results page, and if those ads are run by your competition.

Creating a keyword list

Once all the keywords and phrase are combed through, click the Review plan button on the right side, below all the plan stats. If this keyword research is for a PPC campaign, you’ll need to enter a bid for any of the metrics to show up in the table. If this keyword research is for content planning or SEO purposes, you can download an excel document without doing anything further. Click download and change the file format to Excel CSV and then click Download again to get the document. This excel sheet will give you average monthly searches, competition, etc. Use this list to build your website content strategy around.