How to do Google Ads Keyword Research in 2025

welcome back to get Google ready for 2025 we're going to take you through everything that you need to know so that you can successfully set up and optimize all of the Google ads campaigns that you'll be needing to use in 2025 now before we get into setting up your campaigns one of the core activities that you'll need to get right is completing your keyword research as you may very well be aware that a lot of Google ads campaigns are built upon this whole concept of you selecting keywords to Target your ads now if you're new

to Google ads you may not be aware that over the last couple of years there has been some really significant changes to the way that Google uses his key match targeting and that's why you can hear some conflicting information about how the keyword match types in Google work so before I take you through the process of how to complete your keyword research what I do want to confirm is that Google Now targets the meaning of the keyword phrase not just the keywords that you enter and that is a really really important concept to understand and

it is going to be more and more important because not only is this changing with inside of Google ads what is also changing in the search landscape is that the way that people actually conduct searches will be different and it'll be a lot more conversational based where people will start with an initial Google search and then it'll move into like a chatbot feature and that's why Google is now moving over to this meaning or intent-based keyword targeting so what we're going to do now is we're going to jump into a screen share where I'm going

to firstly take you through a quick guide of how the match types work in Google but what I also want to confirm with you is that once you complete your initial keyword research that is not the end of optimizations and your refinements that you'll make inside a Google ads that's why I want to give you access to my Google ads optimization checklist and this is a checklist which you can use for all of the different Google ads campaigns you're going to be using and it also lets you know how you can go through and continue

to refine your keyword targeting and if you want to get access to my updated Google ads optimization checklist so that you know exactly what you need to be doing inside of Google ads every single week all you need to do is to follow the link in the description below and you can get free access to my Google ads optimization checklist so with all that said let's jump into screen share and remember I'm going to take you through two things firstly we're going to have a brief discussion on how keyword targeting Works inside of Google ads

and then I'll take you through that step-by-step process of completing your keyword research for your Google ads campaigns all right before I take you into the step-by-step process of completing your keyword research it's important that I take you through the different keyword match types remember what I said that this has drastically changed with the change being that Google now works on this intent basis so previously if you were to have an exact match keyword and if the keyword that you're targeting was furniture store so for the keyword Furniture Store historically for exact match it would

only appear if they had searched furniture store in that order if they had searched store Furniture it wouldn't work but remember it's targeting the same meaning so even if it was home furnishing store or stores that I can buy furniture and it could even be inter related terms like that so couch stores dining room table stores because it's got the meaning of furniture so anything that Google relates to Furniture would appear inside of that exact match and then it just builds out from there obviously phrase match now I don't use phrase match anymore now if

you've got some functioning campaigns that are working well on phrase match I'm not saying to change it what I'm saying for new campaigns I'm only using exact match and Broad match the reason being is because phrase match used to have a difference in that basically phrase match was similar to exact match except it could appear in any order whereas now because exact match it can appear in any order and it's got relative meanings to it it doesn't have any difference now so it's phrase match and Broad match for broad match broad match it's just even

broad up so it's not just the same meaning it's also words that are related to that so that's the two keyword phrases that I'd be using match types exact match or broad match I generally start with broad match and the reason for why we start with broad match is because there is so much changing within the search landscape even as we speak right now 15% of all Google searches are brand new in that they've never been searched before and also because search is getting to become more conversational that's why I recommend that we have one

to two broad match keywords that have longer keyword TOS so never do like home decor or Furniture Store you'd want to do larger keywords at least three words but ideally four or five and then you build it out with exact match so that's that update on how the keyword match types work and right now let's jump to another screen show I can show you the step-by-step process of how to complete your keyword research inside of Google ads let's now go through the step-by-step process of how to complete your keyword research inside of Google ads using

the Keyword Planner now what we're looking at here is this is the end result of what we want to have where we've got our keywords broken into different campaigns different ad groups and different keywords now the place that we start with I recommend with all of your keyword research that you want to start with about three or four different keywords that you know that you want to add as your initial theme so when you've got that and you can just write that down in a Google notes or in a doc just three or four different

keyword ideas that you can use to enter into the Keyword Planner so when you're inside of Google ads and I'm inside of a Google ads training profile in here where you need to go to is you need to go into your tools into planning and then your Keyword Planner so just as a reminder you go into tools planning Keyword Planner and then you want to choose discover new keywords and then this is where you add in those initial keywords so what I'll do obviously I've already got the end result here but I'll just go through

and just add in a couple of different keywords that we initially started with and we're going to add these in here now you can add up to 10 different keywords and the other thing that I would recommend that is if you also start with adding your website and for this example this is the website that we're going to be creating a Google ads campaign for so we add that in through there so you've got your initial keywords and your website in through here then you go through and click on get results and what this does

is let me just explain some different elements of what we're seeing in the screen through here is that initially with the keywords is what you'll see is you'll see the keywords that you provided so these are the keywords that you gave Google then it gives you some different keyword ideas and these are based off similar keywords to what you're looking at through what you provided and if you go down to the bottom you can see here that you just got you know in this example we've got over 132 different ideas what you want to be

looking at in through here is when you're looking at these columns is obviously Google gives you the average monthly searches but then what you can also see is you can also see what's been happening over the previous months now I do need to stress that this is what's been happening in the past not in the future so it's giving you data based off what's been happening over the previous 12 months and then you can also see uh you know the 3mon change year- on-ear change now when it comes to competition Google gives three levels low

medium and high now as a very very general rule the lower the competition the lower the bid and the lower the CPC bid so that's the amount that you'll have to pay per click and when you're looking at the top of the page versus the top of the page high range is we're talking here low range is positions 2 3 and four top of the page is the position number one so what you can do through here is that you try to want to be looking at now what I really look at with our keyword

research remembering the way that we're looking at structuring our Google ads search campaigns is we're looking at selecting two or three broad match keywords that have have multiple words in them ideally more than three remembering as we said that now Google targets the meaning of the keyword phrase not just the keywords that you're mentioning in your keyword Target so more words helps to give Google greater context of what you're actually wanting to search and what you're actually want to Target now because we're going to be having a couple of broad match keywords I'm not too

worried about the average monthly searches because we know the way that Google works is it'll go beyond these selections so I'm looking for two types of keywords one I'm looking for two or three which going to be my exact match keywords and then if there's any other keywords which I know are just highly highly relevant I may also select them as an exact match keyword before we get to that what I do want to show you is over here you can also refine your keyword so let's just say that for this one if you don't

know barley our Villas are in seyc but Google is also saying look do you want to Target changu and Cuda I'm going to exclude them and the reason for that is because I just know that they're not relevant if you know Bary like those locations on a Google map which is what Google's picking up they're not far away but they're very very different locations with very very different markets and then what you can also do you can also look to remove your brand or other brands and then also as well depending on what your initial

keywords are that you are adding in there you'll have all different options to be able to refine your keywords if you add these in or exclude them you can see that Google is changing the amount of keywords that are available so what you want to do through here is firstly start with the keywords that I added now the ones that we've got in through here as a reminder too for things like one bedroom and one bedroom whether it's spelled out or it's the number Google is going to see them as the same so you don't

need to include both of those but there's no harm in including both of those and then we also go down and have a look at are there any other keywords which are relevant for looking at targeting once you go through and make all of your selections as I said you can select more but that's the process you go through I'm just looking at the data looking if there are ones which have a higher competition I do go through and have a look at the topper page and lower page bid to see whether it's worthwhile for

that one because of it doesn't have a super super high volume I'm happy and those CPC ranges are within my budget if they were outside of my budget I remove them and that's where you do have to make some initial decisions which is going to be best for your business or your client's business so once you've gone through and selected all of your keywords what you want to do is you want to add keywords to create your plan you can see here now we' got the notification that these keywords were added to our plan you

then want to go up into you can go up into either your forecast or your saved keywords and then what you want to do from here is you want to go through and download them either into a CSV or a Google sheet now I have done this through a Google sheet so if I go through and open up this Google sheet you can see that's what we start with we start with just a list of all of the data and the estimated clicks estimated Impressions and what I do is I go through and make the

sheet look like this now the way that I've done that is that I'll go through and add in some new columns so a campaign at an ad group so I'll get rid of the columns that I don't need and then what I do from there is basically I added my campaign my ad group and my keyword then I've got all the average monthly searches competition all of that information in through there and then what I spend some time doing is I just break these out into different keyword themes remembering what we're wanting to do is

we're wanting to have one keyword theme so we've only got one keyword theme per ad group so you can see through here I've got my one-bedroom Villa campaign My two-bedroom Villa campaign and then just a general campaign and I've got some different ad groups based around those different campaigns and from that we've now completed our keyword research I do keep it in this sheet as well cuz sometimes if you're not doing this for your business but you're doing it for a client you may need to get some approval so I've always found that this is

a really nice tidy sheet that you can for off to your clients so they can see a bit of an idea of what keywords you're going to be targeting what the searches are and what the competition areas and what the CPC bits are and that's how you complete keyword research in Google ads and that's the step-by-step process that you use to complete your Google ads keyword targeting and remember if you want that extra help with how to optimize your Google ads campaigns correctly all you need to do is to follow that link in the description

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