SEO has a lot of moving parts, but it’s all about helping the right people find the right page at the right time.
Most work falls into two big buckets: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Backlinks are the primary driver of off-page SEO. On-page SEO covers your content, title tags, meta descriptions, internal linking, structured data, and site architecture—everything on your pages that helps searchers and search engines understand your topic.
It’s nearly impossible (unless you get extremely lucky) to build a successful on-page SEO strategy without solid keyword research.
There are tons of tools to help you discover relevant keywords, but Google Keyword Planner is one of the most useful starting points.
The best part: it’s free. All you need is a Google Ads account.
While Keyword Planner was created for PPC advertising, it doubles as a powerful SEO ideation tool.
You don’t have to spend money on ads to research keywords. If your account isn’t actively advertising, you’ll typically see search-volume ranges rather than exact numbers, but the ranges are still enough to size demand and compare topics.
I’m assuming most of you already have a Google Ads account. If not, it’s quick to set up—do that when you’re ready to dive in.
Then follow this guide to get the most from Keyword Planner and turn research into content that earns rankings and traffic.
Google Keyword Planner features
Before jumping into tactics, it helps to understand what Keyword Planner can do for you.
It’s designed for paid search, so some reports skew toward ads, but many are perfect for SEO planning. Here are the most useful benefits:
- Find new keyword ideas from seed words, phrases, URLs, and categories.
- See search volumes (as exact values for active advertisers or as ranges) plus trend data to spot seasonality.
- Get performance forecasts (for PPC) that help compare relative potential across keyword sets.
- Refine results by location, language, network, and date ranges to match your audience.
- Filter ideas by average monthly searches, competition (paid), bid ranges, and—when linked with Search Console—organic metrics like impressions and average position.
Note: organic metrics in Keyword Planner require linking Google Ads with Google Search Console.
For what follows, we’ll focus on the features that help you find and prioritize keywords for on-page SEO and content planning.
Discover new keywords
Start by using Keyword Planner to expand your universe of ideas.
When you know which queries are tied to your site, brand, niche, or campaign, you can shape content that aligns with search intent and fills gaps in your topical coverage.
Log in to Google Ads and open Keyword Planner.
From your Ads dashboard, click the tools icon in the top-right menu. In the “Planning” column, select “Keyword Planner.”
Keyword Planner gives you two core options.
- Discover new keywords.
- Get search volume and forecasts.
Choose “Discover new keywords.”
Now enter a mix of seed inputs—single words, multi-word phrases, and a relevant URL—and let Google generate ideas. The better your inputs, the better the ideas.
Keyword Planner is powerful, but it needs direction. Feed it specific, topical seeds rather than vague one-word categories.
You can combine words, phrases, and a URL (yours or a competitor’s) to anchor results to a real page. Use all three when you can.
Here’s an example of a research setup for Quick Sprout.
I mixed a few single words like “SEO,” specific phrases like “content marketing” and “ecommerce conversions,” and longer phrases like “small business marketing.”
I also added the Quick Sprout homepage URL so the tool could align ideas to our topical focus.
That’s far more useful than tossing in a broad term like “marketing” by itself.
Analyze the search results
After you run your search, you’ll see a lot of data. Don’t let it overwhelm you—you’ll slice it down in a moment.
If you’re not running ads, you can ignore the purely PPC columns. Focus on the ones that help you size demand and prioritize content.
Here’s how to read the table quickly:
Keyword Planner might generate thousands of ideas from a single search. By default, you’ll see data from the past 12 months, but you can change the date range to check seasonality and momentum.
Above the ideas, you’ll also see the metrics for your seed keywords.
For SEO, the most helpful columns are “Avg. monthly searches” and “Competition.”
Ad impression share, top-of-page bid ranges, and account status are for paid campaigns.
Search-volume ranges can be broad (e.g., 100K–1M). Exact numbers usually require active ad spend, but ranges are still enough to compare opportunities.
Use the “Competition” column carefully. It reflects advertiser density for paid search—not organic difficulty. Treat it as a directional proxy, then validate difficulty by looking at the live SERP and the top-ranking pages’ quality.
Broad terms with huge volume (like “social media”) may look attractive, but they’re often too general to target with a single page and hard to match with clear intent.
More specific queries (like “social media manager”) may have strong volume and high advertiser competition, which signals commercial interest—and higher effort to win.
Pay attention to mid-tail terms that combine reasonable volume with clearer intent (for example, service-modified queries such as “SEO company” or “digital marketing agency”). These can anchor pages that actually convert.
As you work the list, look for clusters—groups of related terms you can cover together with one strong page and a few supporting sections instead of dozens of thin posts.
Before going deeper, use filters and sorting to make patterns obvious.
Sort by search volume to find head terms, by low competition to find easier PPC spaces, and scan trend metrics to catch rising topics worth covering now.
Narrow your search
A list of 4,000+ ideas is too much to action. Trim it to the most relevant candidates.
First, switch from “Broadly related ideas” to “Closely related ideas.” This immediately raises topical relevance and reduces noise.
This single filter often cuts the list in half.
Use the refined list to spark new, tighter searches. Feed Keyword Planner with the most promising terms from your first pass to go deeper on a theme.
Earlier, I pulled “SEO company,” “digital marketing agency,” and “web marketing.” Here’s what happens when you combine those terms with the Quick Sprout URL.
Using closely related ideas with tighter seeds produced a few hundred high-relevance keywords—much easier to evaluate.
You can also narrow by location, language, and network. This is essential if you serve specific regions or languages.
For example, a retailer focused on New England doesn’t need U.S.-wide data.
Filter to the states you actually target.
Location filters are critical for ads, but they’re also useful for SEO to understand how demand and competition vary by region.
When you’ve got a focused set, export the ideas to a spreadsheet.
Working in a sheet makes it easier to label intent, group keywords into clusters, assign a primary keyword per page, and track which pages you’ll create or update.
Click “Download keyword ideas” (top right) to export a CSV and keep your notes organized.
View keyword forecasts
Return to the main Keyword Planner screen.
This time choose “Get search volume and forecasts.”
Previously you saw historic search volumes. Forecasts model what could happen if you ran ads on those keywords.
While forecasts don’t predict organic traffic, they do help you compare relative opportunity and CPCs, and they reinforce which terms have strong commercial intent.
For example, based on three service-focused keywords, Google might project ~20,000 impressions and a few hundred clicks at a given monthly budget, with an average paid position around the top of the page.
You may decide that forecast isn’t compelling for ads—and that’s fine. Use it to sanity-check demand, then pursue the terms organically with content that beats what’s ranking now.
When a forecast looks strong and aligns with your goals, you can test PPC while you build organic coverage. Either way, the research informs your content plan.
Conclusion
With a prioritized keyword list, it’s time to upgrade your on-page SEO.
Cluster related keywords by topic, pick a clear primary keyword for each page, and map supporting variants and questions to sections and FAQs. Aim to satisfy the searcher’s intent fully on a single, comprehensive page.
Create helpful content in formats your audience prefers: in-depth guides, how-tos, comparisons, checklists, images, videos, and infographics. Keep pages updated as facts, prices, and tools change.
Optimize your title tags and headings to reflect the query and the benefit of your page. Use internal links generously with descriptive, natural anchor text (avoid repetitive, forced exact-match anchors). Add structured data where appropriate to improve clarity and eligibility for rich results.
You can refer to my complete guide on SEO for detailed on-page best practices.
Spend time in Google Keyword Planner. It’s free, fast, and great for sizing demand and building smart topic clusters.
As you get comfortable, reuse the workflow above—seed, discover, filter, cluster, and publish—and you’ll find keywords you can realistically win and content that deserves to rank.