How to use Google Keyword Planner, step by step

To use Google Keyword Planner, sign in to a Google Ads account, open Tools then Keyword Planner, and pick one of two modes: "Discover new keywords" to turn a seed word or your website into keyword ideas, or "Get search volume and forecasts" to paste a list you already have. Planner returns average monthly search volume, competition and suggested bid ranges for each term. It is free to use, though you need a Google Ads account to reach it, and the volume figures come in broad buckets rather than exact numbers.

What Google Keyword Planner is (and is not) for

Keyword Planner is Google's own keyword tool, and it pulls volume straight from Google's search data, which is why so many people treat it as the source of truth. But it was built for one job: helping advertisers plan a paid campaign. Every number it shows is shaped for someone deciding what to put a media budget behind, not for a writer deciding what article to publish. That origin explains most of its quirks, so keep it in mind as you read the data.

The practical upshot: Planner is excellent for a free, first-party read on demand, and clumsy for the clustering and difficulty judgment that content SEO actually needs. Used for what it is good at, it belongs in every keyword workflow. Used as your only tool, it will steer you wrong.

Is Google Keyword Planner free?

Yes. Keyword Planner itself costs nothing to use, and you do not have to run any ads to access it. You do need a Google Ads account, which is free to create. The one catch: accounts that have never spent on ads often see volume as wide ranges (for example, 1K to 10K a month) instead of the tighter numbers a spending account sees. You can still work with the ranges; you just cannot read them as precise figures.

How to access Keyword Planner step by step

1. Create or sign in to a Google Ads account at ads.google.com. If it prompts you to build a campaign, look for the "switch to Expert mode" or "create an account without a campaign" link so you are not forced to set up billing.
2. Open the Tools menu in the top navigation and choose Keyword Planner under Planning.
3. Pick a mode. "Discover new keywords" generates ideas from a seed; "Get search volume and forecasts" reports on a list you paste in.

Discover new keywords

Enter up to ten seed words or a domain, set the location to the United States and the language to English, and run it. Planner returns a table of related keyword ideas, each with average monthly searches, a three-way competition label (low, medium, high) and top-of-page bid ranges. Sort by average monthly searches to see the demand, but do not stop there, because the competition column is about ad bidding, not organic ranking difficulty. Two very different things wear the same word here.

Get search volume and forecasts

Paste a list of keywords you already have (from autocomplete, a competitor, or your own Search Console) and Planner reports volume and forecast metrics for each. This is the faster path once you have candidates, and it is how you sanity-check a list before committing to write. If you only need the demand number for a set of known terms, a purpose-built search volume checker does the same read without the ads-account overhead.

How to read the data without being misled

The numbers are useful once you know what each one actually measures. Three things trip people up most often.

1. Volume is an average, and often a bucket. "Average monthly searches" is a rounded twelve-month average, so it hides seasonality and, on non-spending accounts, collapses into ranges. A term that reads "1K to 10K" could be either. Treat Planner volume as a rough size, not a precise count.
2. Competition is about ads, not SEO. The low/medium/high label reflects how many advertisers bid on the term, which has little to do with how hard it is to rank a page organically. A keyword can show "low" competition here and still be dominated by huge, unbeatable sites in the organic results. For ranking difficulty you need a different measure.
3. Planner groups by close variants. It bundles near-identical phrasings and reports the combined volume, which can inflate a term's apparent demand. Read the idea list as themes, not exact standalone queries.

Turning Planner data into a content plan

Planner gives you demand. It does not tell you which keywords belong on the same page, which ones you can actually rank for, or what to write. That gap is the real work of keyword research, and it is manual if you stop at Planner: you export the ideas, judge organic difficulty by hand, group phrasings by intent into clusters, and decide a page for each. The demand read is step one of maybe five.

This is exactly where Planner ends and a content-focused workflow begins. Once you have the demand, the SEO keyword research pass scores each term for organic difficulty and intent, groups the list into topic clusters, and hands back a page-by-page plan, the steps Planner was never built to do. If you would rather skip the ads account entirely, a Google Keyword Planner alternative built for SEO gives you the volume read plus the clustering and difficulty judgment in one place.

When to use Keyword Planner, and when to reach past it

Use Keyword Planner when you want a free, first-party demand read, when you are actually planning paid search, or when you want to cross-check a volume number against Google's own data. It is genuinely the best free source for that. Reach past it the moment you need organic difficulty, intent tagging, or clustering, because those are the judgments that decide what you publish, and Planner does not make them. The tool is a superb altimeter. It is not a map, and building a content plan needs the map most of all.

The fastest way to see the difference is to run one seed through both: read the raw volumes in Planner, then drop the same seed into the free Keywordpilot demo and watch it come back scored for difficulty, tagged for intent and grouped into the pages worth writing. The demand number is where research starts. The plan is where it pays off.