Keyword Planner is a free tool inside Google Ads that suggests keywords and estimates how often they are searched and what advertisers bid on them. It is built for planning ad campaigns, but it is also one of the few sources of search data that comes directly from Google, which is why it is widely used in keyword research for SEO.
How Keyword Planner works
You open it from the Tools menu in a Google Ads account, under Planning. It offers two starting points:
- Discover new keywords: enter a few seed keywords or a website address and it returns related ideas.
- Get search volume and forecasts: paste a list you already have and it returns figures for each term, plus a forecast of clicks and cost if you bid on them.
For each keyword it shows average monthly searches, the change over three months and over a year, a competition rating of low, medium or high, and a low and high estimate for the top-of-page bid. The competition rating measures how many advertisers bid on the term in Google Ads. It says nothing about how hard the keyword is to rank for organically.
Two settings change everything. Location defaults to whatever the account was set up with, so for UK data set it to the United Kingdom, or to London or another city if you only serve one area. Language should be English. Accounts with little or no ad spend usually see search volumes as broad ranges, such as 100 to 1,000, rather than precise figures.
Why it matters
Keyword Planner tells you whether people search for something at all and how they phrase it. A business in Bristol might call its service “commercial cleaning” while customers search for “office cleaners Bristol”. Seeing the actual wording before you write a page or build a campaign stops you targeting phrases nobody uses.
Its bid ranges give a rough sense of what clicks may cost in your sector before you commit budget. A UK solicitor looking at personal injury terms, for instance, will see much higher top-of-page bids than a local florist, and that shapes whether paid search is worth testing.
Common mistakes
- Leaving the location on the wrong country, so the figures are not UK figures.
- Reading the competition column as SEO difficulty. For that you need a keyword difficulty score from an SEO tool.
- Treating ranged volumes as exact numbers and building forecasts on them.
- Ignoring that close variants are grouped together, so several spellings may share one figure.
- Dismissing a term because it shows low volume, when it is exactly what buyers type.
How to act on it
Set location to the United Kingdom or your city, language to English and the network to Google. Start with five to ten seed terms that describe what you sell in your customers’ words, then export the ideas to a spreadsheet. Group them by the intent behind each search, decide which page or ad group each group belongs to, and drop terms that do not describe something you offer.
Treat the figures as a guide to relative demand rather than a promise of traffic, and check seasonal patterns over twelve months before drawing conclusions. If you want this done for you, with each term mapped to one page, my keyword research service starts with Keyword Planner and checks it against what the search results actually show.