What are some tools and techniques for keyword research in online advertising?

Keyword research from existing data in Search Console and Google Ads Search Terms reports can provide content opportunities based on what we already know about our users. Marrying paid and organic keywords can be a powerful way to maximize visibility in both results. Keyword research from reverse-engineering competitor traffic can help augment paid search keywords in ad groups and can provide new content opportunities we haven't yet thought of or appeared for yet. Keyword research from a list of seed keywords, when combined with internal data and competitive insights, can be the catalyst to a full content roadmap, often involving ontology, taxonomy, and content hierarchy planning.

In my field of school marketing, specifically for schools that serve a neurodiverse populations, it’s important to keyword not just diagnoses, but questions parents are likely to ask. For example, how to help my child who struggles with math.

In my experience, using existing search term data, competitive keyword insights, and in-depth seed keyword mining to build a content roadmap is the big picture goal of keyword research. Try not to get hung up on competition and cost-per-click metrics, SEO is a long game, and even if you're not number 1 in Google for a competitive keyword doesn't mean you can't still receive traffic from that keyword or over a few years eventually earn that top spot. For PPC, don't look at keywords, look at the actual search terms that drove leads or revenue, and then fold them into your content strategy. This is a 'data-driven content strategy' vs using 3rd party tools for insights. Continuously review Search Console and introduce new content over time.

Commonly used keyword tools, outside of Google's own Keyword Planner, include Google Search Console (for search terms already driving impressions or clicks), SEMRush, Ahrefs, AnswerThePublic, and many others. A favorite technique at Wiideman is to take exports of all the data from every tool we have access to and put them into individual tabs in a Google Sheet. We then use a Google Sheets extension called Keyword Clusterizer to combine all of the keywords into a single tab organized by theme. We then go group by group, or row by row, and decide if the keyword idea is relevant, not relevant, or not sure. The end result is first step to building new silos of content based on an aggregate of keywords from multiple sources.

I find the best starting point for keyword research for any business is its own Google Search console. This organic search data tells you what queries people are using to find your business. It will not only give you ideas on what to work on but also provide feedback on what is working i.e. what percentage of your queries contain your brand. What you harvest for research then becomes a good starting point for the keyword tools mentioned above.

It can be exciting to watch the creation of ad groups when using Google Search Console search terms to pages Google already deems helpful and relevant. I've seen Quality Scores start at 9 and 10 using this method. More importantly, using high-converting Search Term data (not keyword performance) from existing campaigns can make it easy to isolate and segment top-performers into their own campaigns and ad groups, preventing budgets from being cannibalized by lower-converting search terms. Micro-managing Search Term reports for the first 90-days can help identify negative keywords to use as well, respectively increasing ad quality and lowering costs over time.