How to Do Keyword Research for Google Ads (The Strategic Way, Not the Spray-and-Pray Way)

Most Google Ads accounts don’t fail because of bad bidding strategies or weak ad copy. They fail at the keyword level — buying clicks from people who were never going to become customers.

We’ve audited hundreds of accounts where the campaign structure looked fine, the ads were decent, and the landing pages were passable. But buried in the search terms report was the real story: 40–60% of spend going to searches that had zero business value. Wrong industry, wrong intent, wrong geography, wrong everything. And it all traced back to keyword research done in twenty minutes with a half-baked Keyword Planner session.

This guide fixes that. It’s not a tour of every button in Keyword Planner. It’s a framework for thinking about keywords the way a strategist does — starting with who’s buying and working backward to what they type.

Start With Buyer Intent, Not Search Volume

The single most common mistake in Google Ads keyword research is sorting by search volume and working down the list. Volume is a metric about popularity. It tells you nothing about purchase intent, competitive cost, or whether the person typing that query has any interest in giving you money.

Before you open Keyword Planner, write down the answers to three questions:

• What is the specific problem your product or service solves?
• What words does a buyer — not a researcher, an actual buyer — use when they’re ready to act?
• What would disqualify a searcher as a customer? (Wrong location, wrong budget tier, DIY intent, student doing a report, etc.)

That third question is where most accounts leave money on the table. Your keyword list and your negative keyword list are built simultaneously. If you’re a commercial HVAC company, “HVAC repair” is a keyword you want — but “HVAC repair DIY,” “HVAC school near me,” and “HVAC repair how to” are negatives you need locked down before day one.

Think about intent in three tiers:

1. Transactional: “emergency plumber near me,” “buy CRM software,” “hire Google Ads agency.” These people are ready. CPCs are high, conversion rates are high, and this is where your budget should be concentrated.
2. Comparative: “best CRM for small business,” “Google Ads vs Facebook Ads,” “top rated HVAC companies.” These people are evaluating. They can convert, but the path is longer.
3. Informational: “how does CRM work,” “what is Google Ads,” “HVAC maintenance tips.” These people are learning. In most Google Ads accounts, these are a waste of money unless you have a specific top-of-funnel strategy and a way to measure it honestly.

For most advertisers — especially those with limited budgets — you want your keyword list dominated by transactional intent, with selective bids on high-quality comparative terms. Informational keywords belong in your SEO strategy, not your paid search budget.

How to Actually Use Google Ads Keyword Planner (Without Getting Baited by Bad Data)

Keyword Planner is useful. It’s also the tool that’s convinced more advertisers to chase high-volume, low-intent keywords than anything else in the Google ecosystem. Use it with your eyes open.

Access it through your Google Ads account under Tools → Planning → Keyword Planner. You’ll use two features: Discover new keywords and Get search volume and forecasts.

Discover new keywords is where you start. Enter your core service or product, your homepage URL, or both. Google will return a list of related terms with estimated monthly searches, competition levels (Low/Medium/High), and suggested bid ranges.

Here’s how to read those metrics honestly:

• Search volume ranges are wide. “1K–10K searches/month” is a massive range. Don’t make budget decisions based on these estimates — treat them as directional signals.
• Competition level means advertiser competition, not SEO difficulty. “High” competition means many advertisers are bidding, which correlates with higher CPCs. It also often signals strong commercial intent — people bid on keywords that convert.
• Suggested bid ranges are Google’s estimates, not gospel. Your actual CPC will depend on your Quality Score, your landing page relevance, and the specific auction dynamics in your geography. We’ve seen accounts pay 30% below suggested bids consistently. We’ve seen others pay 2x over. The number in Keyword Planner is a planning input, not a promise.

Export the full list to a spreadsheet. Don’t edit in Keyword Planner — it’s not built for that work. You want to sort, filter, and annotate in a tool that doesn’t fight you.

One more thing: Keyword Planner data is based on Google’s logged-in user base and shows aggregated trends. It sometimes underreports volume for very specific, long-tail commercial terms — the exact keywords that often convert best. Don’t dismiss low-volume terms. A keyword showing 10–100 searches/month that maps perfectly to a buyer with a specific, expensive problem can generate your best leads.

Three Research Inputs That Make Keyword Planner Actually Useful

Keyword Planner alone is a one-legged stool. Here’s what you add to make it stable.

1. Your Own Search Terms Report (If You Have One)

If you’ve run any Google Ads before, your search terms report is the most valuable keyword research document you have. It shows exactly what people typed before clicking your ads. Mine it aggressively. Look for:

• High-converting queries you’re not explicitly bidding on (add them as exact match)
• Patterns in irrelevant queries (turn them into negatives or negative keyword themes)
• Surprising long-tail variations that reveal how buyers describe their problem

2. Competitor Research

Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SpyFu will show you which keywords your competitors are bidding on and ranking for organically. You’re not blindly copying their list — you’re pressure-testing your own. If five of your direct competitors are all bidding on a term you’re ignoring, that’s worth investigating.

Google’s own Auction Insights report (available once your campaigns are live) will also show you which competitors are showing up in your auctions. Cross-reference that with their website’s messaging to understand how they’re positioning. If you’re thinking about going after their branded terms, our breakdown of competitor keyword targeting in Google Ads walks through whether that’s actually worth the budget.

3. Customer Interviews and Sales Call Language

This one sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. Talk to five recent customers. Ask them: “What did you search for before you found us?” and “What words did you use to describe the problem you were trying to solve?” You’ll find language that never shows up in any keyword tool — because it’s how real humans talk, not how marketers write product pages.

If you’re in B2B, loop in your sales team. The phrases prospects use on discovery calls are often excellent keyword seeds. That language reflects genuine buyer intent in a way no algorithm can replicate.

Building Your Keyword List: Structure Before Volume

Once you have raw material from multiple sources, the real work begins: organizing keywords into a structure that maps to your campaigns and ad groups.

The rule here is simple: keywords in the same ad group should share the same intent and the same logical ad and landing page. If you’re mixing “emergency HVAC repair” with “HVAC maintenance contracts” in one ad group, you can’t write an ad that’s genuinely relevant to both. You’ll write something generic that speaks perfectly to neither — and you’ll pay for it in lower click-through rates and worse conversion rates.

Group your keywords by:

• Service or product line (each core offering gets its own campaign)
• Intent tier (transactional vs. comparative, separated where budget allows)
• Geography (if you serve multiple markets with meaningfully different CPCs or messaging)
• Brand vs. non-brand (always separate — branded campaigns should run with near-100% impression share and you should never let non-brand spend cannibalize your branded budget)

This structure feeds directly into your ad copy. When your keyword list is tightly organized, writing ads that achieve strong relevance becomes straightforward. Sloppy keyword grouping is usually why ad copy feels generic — it’s not a creative problem, it’s a structural one. For more on turning that structure into copy that actually converts, see our guide on writing Google Ads copy that converts.

Match Types: The Decision That Determines How Much of Your Budget Goes to the Wrong People

Match type isn’t a setting you revisit later. It’s a fundamental keyword research decision that determines how literally Google interprets your keyword list — and how much control you actually have over who sees your ads.

Here’s where we stand after managing tens of millions in spend:

Exact match is your precision tool. The ad only shows when someone searches for your keyword or a very close variant. Lower volume, higher intent, typically better conversion rates. Start here on new accounts or any time you’re working with a limited budget.

Phrase match is your volume tool with guardrails. Your ad shows when someone’s search includes your keyword phrase in order, with additional words before or after. Reasonable control, decent volume expansion. Useful once you’ve got conversion data to validate the direction.

Broad match is Google’s most profitable product — for Google. Your ad can show for searches that Google decides are “related” to your keyword, including synonyms, conceptually related terms, and sometimes things that would make you wince. We wrote a detailed breakdown of when broad match actually works — the short version is that it can be useful when you have 30+ conversions per month in a campaign, a healthy negative keyword list, and Smart Bidding doing the filtering work. In brand-new accounts with no conversion history, it’s nearly always a budget drain.

The practical approach for most accounts: launch with exact match on your highest-confidence keywords, layer in phrase match as you build conversion history, and make a deliberate case-by-case decision before touching broad match.

Your Negative Keyword List Is Half Your Keyword Strategy

Say it louder for the people in the back who are still treating negatives as an afterthought.

Before your campaigns go live, you should have a starter negative keyword list built. Pull common irrelevant queries from your Keyword Planner research (anything that showed up that clearly doesn’t match your buyer), add industry-standard negatives (for most accounts: “free,” “DIY,” “how to,” “jobs,” “careers,” “salary,” “template,” “course”), and add anything geography-specific that would pull in the wrong audiences.

Then, every single week after launch, open your search terms report and mine for new negatives. This is not optional maintenance — it’s active budget protection. Accounts that do this rigorously consistently outperform accounts that don’t, holding all other variables equal. The math is brutal: if 30% of your clicks are irrelevant and you’re spending $5,000/month, you’re lighting $1,500 on fire every month while wondering why your CPL is too high.

Organize your negatives into shared negative keyword lists in your account so they apply across multiple campaigns without having to add them individually every time.

How to Prioritize: Not All Keywords Deserve Equal Budget

You’ve got a keyword list. Now you need a prioritization framework, because you can’t know upfront which keywords will perform, and spreading budget equally across everything is a strategy for learning nothing useful quickly.

Stack-rank your keywords by two factors: confidence in intent and business value of the conversion.

High confidence, high value keywords get the most budget and your best landing page experience. These are usually your most specific, transactional terms — the ones where someone types the exact name of what you sell followed by their city. Start here, get conversion data, and use that data to make decisions about the next tier.

Moderate confidence or comparative intent keywords get moderate budget with close monitoring. If they convert at acceptable cost-per-lead or ROAS targets, expand them. If they don’t convert at all after meaningful volume, pause them — they may belong in your organic content strategy instead.

Unproven keywords with potential get small budget allocations specifically to gather data. Don’t let curiosity drain your core budget. Set a spend cap, give the keyword enough impressions to form a real opinion (usually 200–500 clicks depending on your conversion rate expectations), and make a decision based on data.

This is especially important if you’re running a new account. The first 90 days of a Google Ads account should be treated as a structured learning exercise, not a full-throttle launch. Our first 90 days framework covers how to sequence this so you’re building on real performance signals instead of guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many keywords should I have in a Google Ads campaign?

There’s no magic number, but more is not better. Tightly themed ad groups with 5–20 closely related keywords typically outperform bloated groups with 50+ terms, because you can write more relevant ads and maintain better Quality Scores. Focus on coverage of your high-intent buyer queries rather than hitting a volume target.

Is Google Ads Keyword Planner free to use?

Yes — it’s free with any Google Ads account. However, if your account hasn’t run active campaigns recently, Keyword Planner will show search volume data in wide ranges (e.g., “1K–10K”) rather than specific numbers. Run even a small active campaign to unlock more precise estimates.

What’s the difference between PPC keyword research and SEO keyword research?

In SEO, you’re often targeting a mix of informational, comparative, and transactional keywords because content can serve all three. In PPC, you’re paying per click — so informational searches that won’t convert are a direct budget drain. PPC keyword research should be weighted heavily toward transactional and high-commercial-intent terms, with much stricter filtering on anything that smells like research or education mode.

How often should I revisit my Google Ads keyword list?

Weekly search term report reviews are non-negotiable for any active campaign. Full keyword strategy reviews — where you revisit your core keyword list, assess which terms are performing, and make structural changes — should happen at minimum monthly, and anytime there’s a significant change in performance, seasonality, or your competitive landscape.

Should I bid on my own brand name?

Almost always yes. Branded campaigns protect your real estate on your own brand searches, typically convert at the highest rate in your account, and often come with the lowest CPCs you’ll ever see. More importantly, if you don’t bid on your brand, your competitors might. Run branded campaigns separately from everything else and aim for impression share above 90%.

What tools besides Keyword Planner should I use for Google Ads keyword research?

SEMrush and Ahrefs are the most useful for competitive intelligence. SpyFu is solid specifically for understanding competitor paid keyword strategies. Google Trends helps with seasonality and rising/declining search interest. Your own search terms report, once you have one, beats all of them for identifying what’s actually converting in your specific account.

If Your Keyword Strategy Needs a Second Opinion

Good keyword research takes a few hours. Bad keyword research takes twenty minutes and costs you months of wasted budget before you figure out what went wrong.

If you’ve been running Google Ads and your search terms report is full of irrelevant queries, your cost per lead keeps climbing without explanation, or you’re not sure whether the keywords you’re bidding on actually reflect what your buyers search — those are signs the foundation needs work before anything else will improve.

A proper keyword and campaign audit will surface exactly where the leaks are. If you want a second set of eyes on your account, here’s how to run a real Google Ads account audit — or reach out and we’ll do it for you.