A guide to expanding and refining your international keyword lists
For each new market you expand into, you need to choose highly targeted keywords based on the search behaviour, culture, and language of the consumers you want to reach.
To know how to expand and refine your keyword list for each market.
As you expand into new markets, international keyword targeting is essential to your success. Keyword Planner is Google’s free tool to help you build new keywords lists, or expand existing ones.
Keyword Planner makes it simple to determine keyword volumes and competition levels across many countries. Correlate search volumes with on-site conversion rates, bounce rates, time-on-site and return visits, and you can easily determine the highest-performing keywords to use in future Search ad campaigns. You can select keywords by country and language. Enter an initial keyword, select a language and/or target countries, and Keyword Planner will return a list of keyword ideas with the associated monthly volume for each.
Research additional keywords — when you want to find additional keywords to add to an existing campaign, you can search for keyword and ad group ideas based on terms relevant to your product or service, your landing page, or different product categories
Get historical statistics and traffic forecasts — use statistics like search volume to help you decide which keywords to use for a new or existing campaign. Get forecasts, like predicted clicks and estimated conversions, to get an idea of how a list of keywords might perform for a given bid and budget. These forecasts can also help guide your decision on which bids and budgets to set
Tip
Dedicate an individual campaign to an individual language. If you want to reach people who speak a particular language, your keywords, ads and landing pages should be in the language targeted, as should your landing pages and the majority of your keywords.
In the following chapters, we’ll cover how to use Keyword Planner to lay the groundwork for a successful campaign.
Market Finder will first give you the most important localised keywords to get yourself found in new markets. You can then expand on these over time. For example, you might use Keyword Planner to find more specific keywords — called long-tail keywords, that don't have a high search volume, but are often more likely to lead to a conversion.
Long-tail keywords are more specific 3-5 word phrases that searchers use when they’re homing in on a purchase. For example, say someone starts searching for the term ‘dining chair’. After visiting various websites, looking at styles and comparison shopping; as they narrow down their choices, they might begin searching for ‘Eames style contemporary dining chair’.
Use your Google Ads account to sign in to Keyword Planner.
Enter one or more of the following in the boxes that appear:
Click Get Ideas
To add more keywords to an ad group, click on the ad group and then click the double arrows » next to the keyword you want to add.
To remove a keyword in an ad group, click the ad group and then the X next to the keyword you want to remove. To remove an entire ad group, click the X next to that ad group.
Adjust the range of max CPC bids to get click and cost estimates for the keywords in your plan.
If you already have a keyword list, you can enter those keywords manually or upload them as a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file to get an idea of how popular those keywords have been. For example, you could enter a list of keywords and get search volume statistics. You can also group your keywords into ad groups.
Use your Google Ads account to sign in to Keyword Planner.
Tip
If you use keyword match types with your keywords, we take only those match types into account when calculating traffic forecasts. For example, if you add a keyword as exact match, your forecasts will give you an idea how that keyword might perform as an exact match keyword.
Save the time of manually combining keywords by multiplying two or more lists of keywords. Then, get historical statistics or traffic forecasts for the new list of combined keywords.
For example, you're advertising a chain of luxury resorts. You might have one keyword list of geographical locations and a second list of keywords that describe your resorts as follows:
| Keyword list 1 | Keyword list 2 |
| Mexico | luxury resort |
| Cabo | hotels |
| Cancun | beach resort |
We'll combine the keywords from both lists to create new keyword phrases, like Cabo hotels or Mexico luxury resort. Then, you can get traffic forecasts or historical statistics for these new keywords.
Use your Google Ads account to sign in to Keyword Planner.
If you already have a list of keywords, you can also enter those keywords manually or upload them as a CSV file to get click and cost forecasts specific to your Google Ads account and the bid that you’ve selected.
Use your Google Ads account to sign in to Keyword Planner.
Enter a list of keywords, one per line or separated by commas. Or, click Choose File to upload a CSV file with your keywords. Note that these keywords won't be added to any of the existing campaigns in your account
Click Get forecasts
The number of clicks that your ad might receive each day if the keyword were to trigger the ad.
How often your ad might appear in a day. An impression is counted each time an ad is shown on a search results page.
The average position on a search results page that your ad might appear in when the keyword triggers the ad to show. '1' is the highest position on the first page of search results. Keywords with an average position of 1—8 generally trigger ads on the first page of search results, while keywords with an average position of 9—16 generally trigger ads on the second page, and so on. An average position of '1.7', for example, means your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2. Average positions are not fixed; they may vary depending on various performance factors.
The average amount that you might spend per day for this keyword.
The ratio of the number of clicks that your ad received divided by the number of times your ad is shown (which we call an impression).
The average amount you might pay for a click. We automatically adjust the final amount you're charged for a click, which is known as your actual cost per click (actual CPC), so you only pay one cent more than the minimum amount required to keep your ad's position. Therefore, the displayed amount may be lower than the overall cost forecast range for all keywords, or the CPC bid already in place for your ad group.
An estimate of the total number of conversions you might get for these keywords. We use your historical estimated total conversion rate as a default, but you can edit this.
The predicted cost divided by the number of conversions you might get.
The total value of all of the conversions expected for these keywords. We use your historical average conversion value as your default, but you can edit it.
The total conversion value that you could get, divided by the predicted cost of your ads.
Bear in mind that historical stats like average monthly searches are only shown for exact match. For example, let's say that your keyword is ‘dark chocolate’. If you want to check that keyword's average monthly searches, we'll show you the same exact match stats whether you use a broad, phrase or exact match type with ‘dark chocolate’.
Traffic forecasts such as clicks and cost, on the other hand, do take into account keyword match types. For example, if you get forecasts for a list of broad match keywords, then we'll take into account any overlap between those keywords.
After you get forecasts for your keywords or campaigns, you can see a breakdown of your forecasts by device. Here’s how to do this:
You can use the Bid adjustment column to increase or decrease your mobile bid by a percentage. In the columns next to this, you’ll see how adjusting your mobile bid affects your forecasts, such as clicks, impressions, cost, click-through rate, average cost per click and average position.
You can also segment your forecasts by location. Here’s how to do this:
Click on the Location tab. By default, you’ll see a table breaking your forecasts down by your targeted locations
To see a more specific geographic segment of your targeted locations, such as region, state, county or city, select one from the Location drop-down menu on that same tab. Bear in mind that you can only select geographic segments that exist in all of your targeted locations. The rest will be greyed out.
After you’ve created a plan, you can edit and refine your ad group and keyword ideas to get an even better idea of how your keywords might perform. Each of your campaigns contains ad groups. Ad groups contain the keywords featured in your ads and direct users to your landing page.
You can easily change all of the keywords in an ad group from broad match to exact match to see whether exact match keywords might better help you reach your advertising goals.
Create a plan by using one of the options in Keyword Planner, then click on Review plan on the right.
Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned. Ads may show on searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches and other relevant variations.
Example keyword: women's hats
Example search: buy ladies’ hats
Ads may show on searches that are a phrase, and close variations of that phrase.
Symbol: "keyword"
Example keyword: "women's hats"
Example search: buy women's hats
Ads may show on searches that are an exact term and close variations of that exact term.
Symbol: [keyword]
Example keyword: [women's hats]
Example search: women's hats
Ads may show on searches without the term.
Symbol: -keyword
Example keyword: -women
Example search: baseball hats
Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an ROI comparable to that of your phrase match keywords. Compared to using only phrase and exact match keywords, using modified broad match can greatly reduce the number of keywords you need because each keyword can match countless word order and spelling variation. To use modified broad match, put a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. The words that are preceded by a (+) sign must appear in the user’s keyword phrase exactly or as a close variation.
Symbol: +keyword
Example keyword: +women's +hats
Example search: hats for women