Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is Google's free tool for finding keyword ideas, checking rough search volume ranges, and pulling ballpark forecasts before you spend anything.

You open it when you are staring at a blank campaign and need to know what people actually type. You paste in a few seed terms or your website, and it hands back hundreds of related keywords, each with an average monthly search figure, a competition label, and a suggested bid range. It is the quickest way to see the shape of the demand around what you sell, and it costs nothing to use.

You will lean on it hardest early on, when you are grouping keywords into ad groups and deciding which themes are worth chasing. The forecasts sitting alongside those ideas give you a rough sense of clicks and cost at a given bid, so you can sanity-check whether a term is even worth a line in your plan. Treat it as a map of the territory, not a guarantee of the trip.

Watch the volumes closely. If your account has little or no spend, Google often shows search volume as wide buckets rather than exact counts, and even the precise-looking numbers are rounded estimates over close variants. They can nudge you toward a term that looks busy but converts for nobody. Use them to compare keywords against each other, not to promise anyone a hard number.

It is a compass, not a calculator.