Keyword research for Google Ads

This site's SEO series covers keyword research for organic ranking — finding what people search, matched to content. Paid keyword research shares the discovery process but optimizes for a different outcome entirely: every keyword here costs real money per click, so commercial intent and cost matter as much as volume.

Google Ads Keyword Planner: built specifically for this

Unlike third-party SEO tools estimating search volume indirectly, Keyword Planner is Google's own tool, using Google's own search data directly — including an actual estimated cost-per-click range per keyword, something no organic-focused tool can provide with the same accuracy, since it comes straight from real auction data.

Reading commercial intent directly from the phrase

Informational (low commercial intent):  "how coffee subscriptions work"
Commercial investigation:                "best coffee subscription boxes"
Transactional (high commercial intent):  "buy coffee subscription"
Branded:                                 "bright leaf coffee subscription"

For Bright Leaf Coffee's Search campaign, transactional and commercial-investigation phrases are the priority — someone searching "how coffee subscriptions work" is still researching, unlikely to convert on this specific visit, and expensive to bid on relative to how rarely it converts. This is the single biggest mindset shift from organic keyword research: a keyword doesn't need to be avoided in content for being low-intent, but bidding real money on it in Ads needs a much higher bar.

A real keyword list, built for Bright Leaf Coffee

Keyword                          Est. CPC   Intent
"coffee subscription"            $2.10      Transactional
"best coffee subscription box"   $1.85      Commercial investigation
"monthly coffee delivery"        $1.95      Transactional
"coffee subscription gift"       $2.40      Transactional (gift ad group)
"specialty coffee subscription"  $2.20      Transactional

Every one of these is transactional or close to it — deliberately excluding purely informational phrases like "how is coffee roasted," which might be excellent content for a blog but a poor fit for a paid search budget aimed at driving subscriptions directly.

Competitor and category research

Keyword Planner also accepts a competitor's URL or a business category as a seed instead of a starting keyword — entering a category like "coffee subscription service" surfaces related terms Google associates with that space, often revealing keyword variations a business wouldn't have thought to search for directly on its own.

Search terms report: real data over research-tool estimates

Once a campaign is live (starting part 2), the Search Terms report shows the actual real search queries that triggered an ad — genuinely more valuable than any pre-launch research tool, since it's real behavior instead of an estimate. This becomes the direct input for part 12's negative keywords: any search term appearing here that clearly doesn't match commercial intent is a candidate to actively exclude.

Keyword volume for Google Ads specifically

A keyword with modest search volume can still be a strong Google Ads target if its intent and conversion rate are high enough — unlike organic SEO, where ranking effort is roughly similar regardless of a keyword's ultimate value, a paid keyword's cost scales directly with competition, so a smaller, cheaper, highly relevant keyword list often outperforms a broader, more expensive one on actual return.

Next: match types — the setting that determines exactly how closely a search has to resemble a keyword before an ad is even eligible to show.