Google Keyword Planner: free access, columns and SEO use

This guide is part of our "SEO tools explained" path. It's for small business owners, beginners and freelancers who want search volumes without paying for a suite. Think of a Kanpur sweet shop choosing which sweets to write about, a Pune coaching centre sizing its exam pages, a D2C brand picking blog topics. You don't need any ads experience.

By the end you'll be able to open Keyword Planner without creating a campaign and pick the right location, language and network. You'll know which columns matter for SEO and which are about ads. You'll also know how to work with volume ranges and turn the results into a keyword sheet with Google Trends and Search Console.

There are five chapters, under 30 minutes in all. Chapter 1 says what the tool is and when you can skip it. Chapter 2 gets you in. Chapter 3 covers the two ways to search and the targeting settings, and chapter 4 explains the columns, filters, forecasts and exports. Chapter 5 puts it to work for SEO and compares it with the paid tools, with prices checked on the vendors' own sites on 16 October 2026. If you're new to keywords, Guide 1's keyword basics is a gentler start.

Keyword Planner is Google's own keyword tool. Google describes it as a way to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.^[1] It lives inside Google Ads, under the Tools menu, because its first job is helping advertisers plan Search campaigns.

That's the thing to hold on to through this whole guide. Every column was designed for someone buying ads. Some of those columns are very useful for SEO. Others look useful and aren't. Chapter 4 sorts them out.

What it does, in plain words

Keyword Planner has two starting points.^[1]

• Discover new keywords. You type a few words about what you sell, or a website address, and it returns a list of related keywords with their numbers.
• Get search volume and forecasts. You paste or upload a list you already have, and it gives you the numbers for those keywords and a forecast of what ads on them might get.

For each keyword you see the average monthly searches: how many times people searched for that keyword and its close variants, in the place and months you picked. By default it's averaged over 12 months.^[2] You also see how that changed recently, how many advertisers compete for it, and the range of bids advertisers have paid to show at the top of the page.

Two other Google tools get mixed up with it. Google Trends shows interest on a 0 to 100 scale, relative to all searches in a place and time, so it's good for seasons and comparisons but gives no counts.^[3] Search Console shows the searches your own site already appeared for. Keyword Planner is the one of the three that puts a size on a keyword you don't rank for yet.

Who it's for

• Small business owners who want to know whether "sweet shop Kanpur" or "mithai shop near me" is the bigger search, without paying for a suite.
• Beginners learning SEO. It costs nothing, and the estimates come from Google's own search data.
• Freelancers sizing a market for a pitch, before a client pays for a suite.
• Anyone planning Google Ads, which is what it was built for. If you'd rather have someone run the ads, see our search ads service.

What it doesn't do

It has no keyword difficulty score for SEO. The "Competition" column measures how many advertisers showed ads on a keyword, not how hard it is to rank in the free results.^[2] It doesn't show who ranks, how many links they have, or what kind of page wins. For that you read the results page yourself, as Guide 2 shows in keyword research in depth.

It also leaves things out. Google says keywords with very low search volumes, and keywords in sensitive categories such as health or finance, may not be discoverable or forecastable at all.^[1] That can matter if you're a dentist in Delhi, especially for treatment and symptom words. Chapter 3 shows what to do instead.

When you don't need it

We'd skip Keyword Planner, or use it only for a quick check, in three cases.

1. Your site already has a year of Search Console data. The Queries report shows the real searches you appear for, with real clicks. Start there; it's Google's measured data about your own site, not an estimate.
2. You sell to a tiny, specific audience. A machine-parts maker in Ludhiana may find that most of its buyers' searches show as zero or don't appear. Talk to customers and read the results pages instead.
3. You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Their keyword tools add difficulty and the pages that rank. Keyword Planner is still a useful second opinion on volume, but you won't live in it.

If you've read Guide 1's keyword basics, you've met Keyword Planner as step four of a free keyword list. This guide goes further: getting in without an ad, every setting, every column, and how to combine it with Trends and Search Console. Next, chapter 2 gets you into the tool without running an ad.

This is where most beginners give up. Google Ads is built to get you running an ad, and the sign-up pushes you towards a campaign at every step. You don't need one. Here's the route, and the settings that you can't undo later.

What Google asks for today

Google's help is short on this. To use basic features like getting new keyword ideas, you must complete your account setup by entering your billing information.^[1] It doesn't say you need a live campaign or any spend.

Google's sign-up guide goes further. It recommends creating your account before creating a campaign, says you can skip all recommendations to create a campaign, and mentions an option to create an account without a campaign.^[5] That's the button you're looking for.

If Keyword Planner is missing or empty

Make sure nothing is spending

Google Ads only charges you for ads. If you skipped the campaign, there's nothing to charge. Still, open Campaigns once after sign-up. If the sign-up created a draft or an enabled campaign anyway, pause or remove it. It takes a minute and saves an awkward card statement.

Link Search Console while you're here

If you also run your site's Search Console, link it to Google Ads. Google's linking page says you need admin access to the Ads account and owner access in Search Console. You start from Tools, Data manager, then Search Console.^[8] Linking gives you a paid and organic report that shows the searches your pages appeared for in the free results.^[8] It's also what Keyword Planner needed, when the column launched, before it could fill "Organic impression share", which chapter 4 explains; you may also have to add that column yourself.^[9]

If you don't have Search Console yet, set it up first with our Search Console guide. Then move on to chapter 3 and run your first search.

When you open Keyword Planner you get two cards. They give you the same kind of numbers, but they start from different places.^[1]

Set the targeting first

Above the results there's a targeting bar. Google's help lists four settings.^[10] Change them before you look at a single number.

• Location. Countries, regions and cities. "India" for a D2C brand that ships everywhere; "Uttar Pradesh" or "Kanpur" for a sweet shop. A "Nearby" link suggests places around the one you typed. Removing every location means "All locations", which is almost never what an Indian business wants.
• Language. The language of the ideas you want. Google Ads supports Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu, among others.^[11]
• Search networks. "Google" means Google Search only. "Google and search partners" adds other Google sites such as Maps, and partner sites that show Google ads. For SEO, pick Google.
• Date range. By default, volumes are averaged over 12 months.^[2] You can pick other months to see what's searched in a season.

Choose seed words the way Google suggests

Google publishes its own tips for getting useful ideas.^[12] In short:

• Describe the category the way customers think of it. "Hiking boots" in Google's example, not a full question like "what are the best hiking boots".
• Be specific, but not too specific. "Wedding venue" works; "wedding" is too general and "wedding venues for small weddings" too narrow.
• Add a website. A keyword plus a website can give more relevant ideas.
• Don't start with an adjective. Start with "hiking boots", then try "best hiking boots".
• Use several phrases on the same topic, not unrelated ones.
• Leave the city out of the seed if you set it as the location. Add a place name only if your customers search from somewhere else.

The website field has two catches. Google doesn't read the text of links on the page you enter.^[1] For ideas from your whole site rather than one page, you add and verify the site in Google Ads. That can take up to a month to show results.^[10]

When you already have a list

Use Get search volume and forecasts. Paste the list, or upload a CSV whose only column is headed "Keyword". Select Submit, then Get started.^[1] You'll land on the forecast page. For SEO, switch to the historical metrics view to see the volumes; the forecast is about ads, as chapter 4 explains.

Clinics, loans and other sensitive topics

Here's the catch for a dentist in Delhi. Google says its personalised advertising and data privacy policies often prevent results for keywords in sensitive categories like health or finance.^[1] You may get an error, or a list with gaps.

Don't take that as "nobody searches". Try the less personal words: "dental clinic", "teeth cleaning", "braces cost". Then fill the gaps from Search Console once the site has data, and from Google's autocomplete and "People also ask". Add Google Trends, which shows relative interest for most topics. Guide 2's point holds: if a phrase came from a real patient, it deserves a section on the right page, whatever a tool says.

Once you have a list with numbers, chapter 4 explains what each column means and which ones to ignore.

A results table in Keyword Planner can run to hundreds of rows and eight or more columns. Here's what each one means, in Google's words where Google defines it, and what we'd do with it for SEO.

The columns, one by one

Why "Competition" isn't keyword difficulty

"Competition: high" sounds like "hard to rank". It isn't. It counts advertisers, for the location and network you chose.^[2] A keyword like "buy sugar free sweets online" may be high, because shops pay for it, and still have weak pages in the free results. A question like "how long does kaju katli last" may be low competition for ads and fiercely contested by food blogs.

To judge SEO difficulty, search the keyword yourself and look at what ranks: the type of page, how good it is, and who wrote it. Guide 2 walks through that in keyword research in depth. If you want a score, paid tools have one; chapter 5 compares them.

The bid columns are more useful than they look. A high top-of-page bid means advertisers expect that search to make money. For a D2C brand choosing between two blog topics with similar volume, the one with the higher bids is usually closer to a purchase. Treat it as a hint about intent, not a fact.

Ranges vs exact numbers

If your account spends little or nothing on ads, you'll probably see volumes as ranges. Search Engine Land reported the buckets in 2016: 0, 1–100, 100–1K, 1K–10K, 10K–100K, 100K–1M and 1M+.^[4] Google confirmed then that advertisers with a "lower monthly spend" could see limited data, and it hasn't published the spend level since.^[4] We wouldn't spend money on ads just to get exact numbers.

Three reasons ranges are enough for SEO:

1. Exact numbers aren't exact either. Google says its search volume statistics are rounded,^[2] and they're averages over the months you pick.
2. You're choosing, not forecasting. "1K–10K" vs "10–100" tells you which page to write first. That's the decision.
3. Other tools fill in. Search Console gives real impressions for keywords you already appear for, and Google Trends shows which of two phrasings is bigger.

Two more quirks. Average monthly searches are shown for exact matches only, whatever match type you pick.^[2] And because the figure includes close variants, a singular and a plural, or a spelling with and without a space, can show the same number, though not always.^[13] When two variants show the same figure, don't add them together.

Filter and refine a long list

Discover new keywords can return hundreds of ideas. Two tools cut it down.^[10]

• Add filter. Filter by keyword text, average monthly searches, either bid range, competition, organic or ad impression share, or exclude keywords already in your account. For SEO, the keyword text filter is the one we'd use most: "contains: price", "contains: near me", "contains: how".
• Refine keywords. A side panel groups the ideas into categories, such as brands or product features. All are ticked by default. Untick a category to drop its keywords, for example a competitor's brand names.

The menu beside the table also breaks volumes down by device (computers, mobiles and tablets with full browsers) and by location.^[10] Use the device split before you plan a page: if nearly all searches for a keyword come from phones, check the page on a phone first.

There's also an Organize keywords into ad groups option. It groups keywords for ad campaigns and works in English only.^[1] Its groups are a reasonable first draft of a topic cluster, but we'd check them by hand against the results pages, as Guide 2's topic clusters chapter explains.

Forecasts: skip them for SEO

Forecasts estimate what ads on your saved keywords might get: clicks, impressions, cost, click-through rate and average cost per click, at the bid and budget you choose.^[2] They're refreshed daily from the last 7 to 10 days of data, adjusted for seasonality.^[1] They cover the Search Network only.^[2]

None of that is an organic traffic forecast. An ad forecast assumes you're paying for a spot at the top. Your page in the free results might sit at position six, or below an AI Overview. So we don't use these numbers in SEO plans. The download button on the forecast page is there if you do plan ads.^[1]

Now you can read every column. Chapter 5 turns that into an SEO keyword list with Trends and Search Console, and compares Keyword Planner with the paid tools.

Keyword Planner answers one question well: roughly how big is this search? An SEO keyword list needs three more answers. When do people search it? Do we already show up for it? And what kind of page wins it? Keyword Planner, Trends and Search Console cover the first three questions between them. The last one needs your own eyes on the results page.

That's why we don't sort a Keyword Planner export by volume and start at the top. The biggest rows are usually the hardest, and the least specific. For a small site, the "100–1K" and "10–100" rows are often where the first wins are. Guide 2 explains how to weigh volume against intent and business value in keyword research in depth.

Once you've written the page, check you've used the keyword naturally with our free checker, and check the title and description in our Meta Tag Analyzer:

How accurate is it?

Nobody outside Google knows exactly. The most cited comparison is from a vendor. Ahrefs compared estimates with Search Console impressions and found Keyword Planner's volumes "roughly accurate in 45% of cases", against 60% for its own tool.^[15] That's a company testing itself, and Ahrefs also builds its volumes partly from Keyword Planner data.^[15] Our reading: every tool's volume is an estimate, so use one tool consistently and compare keywords against each other, not against reality.

What it costs

Keyword Planner is free. You need a Google Ads account with billing details, and you pay only if you run ads (chapter 2). There's no paid version of Keyword Planner itself. The only "upgrade" is spending on ads, which may turn ranges into exact numbers. Google doesn't say how much spend that takes.^[4]

The paid keyword tools list prices in US dollars. None of the pages below showed a rupee price on 16 October 2026. So we give rupees at ₹96 to US$1, the X-Rates monthly average for 1 to 16 October 2026.^[16]

Mangools shows the yearly price first; switch its pricing page to Monthly to see the $30.50.^[20] We haven't listed Ubersuggest here; our Ubersuggest guide covers its plans.

Pros and cons

Alternatives, and which one when

We don't have our own keyword volume tool yet. Our free tools cover the steps after research: checking how a page uses its keywords, and how its title and description look in Google.

For a wider list of free options, see our best free SEO tools guide. If you'd rather hand the research and writing over, our SEO service and content marketing team can build a keyword plan like this for you. You can also get a quote online.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources