Is It Possible to Use Google’s Keyword Tool for Bulk Searches?
For a very long time, Google’s Keyword Planner tool has been one of the most commonly used keyword research tools. After all, what better source could you have for keyword information than Google itself? It seems like getting your data directly from the horse’s mouth would be the best option.
One of the biggest questions I see about the Google Keyword Planner is whether or not you can use it to search for bulk keyword lists or if you have to tediously go through and search your keywords one at a time.
Let’s go over how to use the Google Keyword Planner, what limitations it has, and what other options you might consider using instead.
Table of Contents
How to Access the Google Keyword Planner Tool
First up, even accessing the Google Keyword Tool is slightly harder than you might think. It’s not hard by any means, but there’s a catch to it.
See, the Keyword Planner is meant to be a tool specifically used for keyword planning for the purposes of Google Ads. That means you need to have a Google Ads account in order to even access the tool.
You can easily check whether or not you have one by clicking here. That’s the link to the tool itself. If it lets you in, you have a Google Ads account; if it doesn’t, you need to sign into an account that has enrolled. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up.
Fortunately, signing up for Google Ads is fast and easy. You’ll need to give Google a little information about the business you’ll be advertising to configure the account, but nothing you specify is permanent, so if you need to, you can change it later. Just make sure you use an account you’re fine with having linked to your business.
Once you’re set up, you can click that link again or just click on the Tools section on the left of the Ads main menu, then click Planning and Keyword Planner under it. Here, you can search for and discover new keywords, or you can search a keyword or keyword list and get search volume data.
Since we’re talking about bulk searches, I’m focusing on the second of these two functions here today.
The first one allows you to put in topics and products and find keyword suggestions relevant to your site, but there are a ton of ways to do topic ideation and basic keyword research – including Topicfinder, which I built because I was tired of how lackluster other tools were – so you can use those instead.
How to Use the Google Keyword Planner Tool for Bulk Keyword Searches
Once you click on the search volume and forecasts section, you’re brought to a blank text box with two options: the option to upload a file, and the option to search the list you’ve pasted in.
Since the original question is whether or not you can use the tool for bulk searches, well, here’s your answer. Yes, of course you can. Though, it depends slightly on what your definition is when you say “bulk.”
- 10-100 keywords? No problem. Paste ’em right into the text box, one on each line, and submit.
- Up to 1,000 keywords? Also no problem. The text box submission allows up to a thousand lines, which is a thousand keywords, including long-tail keywords made of multiple words.
- More than 1,000 keywords? You guessed it; still no problem, with one caveat. Once you have over 1,000 keywords you want to evaluate, you need them in a file that you upload rather than raw data in the text box. All you need is a simple CSV file with a single header titled Keyword, and you’re good to go.
Google also allows you to upload an entire keyword plan, including more specific data like which campaign the keyword is part of, what location it’s relevant to, and so on. This isn’t important for our organic SEO research purposes, so I’m generally ignoring it.
The CSV you upload to Google can only have up to 10,000 keywords in it. If you want to search for more keyword information than that – and you might, if you’re a large enough business creating content on a nuanced array of topics – you will need to split it into multiple reports.
Making Use of Data from Google’s Keyword Planner Tool
Once you’ve uploaded your keyword list, you’re taken to the keyword results page, which is the same whether you had Google come up with keywords for you or you specified your own.
This results page shows you several columns of data:
- Keyword
- Average monthly searches (in a range)
- The percentage that this number has changed in the last three months.
- The percentage that this number has changed year over year.
- Estimated keyword competition.
So, you might see data like:
- Basketball Hoop
- 100K – 1M
- 0%
- 0%
- High
The range of monthly searches is very broad and generally falls into buckets like 1K to 10K, 10K to 100K, and 100K to 1M. More on that later.
You can further refine this data using filters at the top. You can, for example, make the geographic filtering broader, choose a different language, and specify if you want to be looking at data from Google’s search partners as well. I don’t recommend changing any of this from the defaults unless you’re planning to use your keyword list for paid advertising since most of the filters are only applicable to paid campaigns and not to organic search.
The main thing you might want to change is the keyword match type. You can choose between broad match (any of the words in your keyword are in the query), phrase match (the specific words are in the query, but there may be more), or exact match (the keyword as-is.) Play around with this and see which suits your keywords the best since it can often depend on how specific those keywords are and whether or not there are similar but off-topic keywords in circulation.
Filtering by competition can be handy as well, if you want to see only keywords that have low competition but a higher-than-average search volume, for prioritization in targeting with your content. It’s not quite as simple as you might hope, though.
Keep in mind, though, that Google’s competition metric is only focused on PPC competition. An extremely high-competition organic keyword could have a low competition rating on the keyword planner because no one is bidding on the expensive ads for it; conversely, a low-competition organic keyword could be included in a lot of PPC broad match campaigns and be rated as high competition.
Google can also give you some information about the keywords in organic search, including the organic impression share and organic average position. However, you need to have linked your Google Search Console and Google Ads accounts for this data to be available.
The Drawbacks of Using the Google Keyword Planner Tool
Now, let’s talk about some of the drawbacks of the Google Keyword Planner.
It’s almost entirely focused on PPC metrics, not organic SEO. Getting organic data out of it requires linking your Google Search Console account, and while that’s not a high bar to clear, it is still very little data compared to tools designed specifically for organic information.
A big part of this is just that Google doesn’t really want all of that organic data to be readily available. They can’t prevent other companies, like Ahrefs or Semrush, from harvesting similar data from the search results, but they don’t want to make it any easier. It would just be a huge vector for SEO exploitation.
The data it gives you includes very broad ranges with very little specificity. Since the scale covers orders of magnitude, it’s extremely broad. A keyword with monthly searches somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 is a relatively narrow range. But, a keyword with a range of 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a much larger range, and the difference between a keyword on the low end and a keyword on the high end is immense. There’s no way to get Google to be more specific, though, so it’s of limited use beyond comparing which keywords in a set are the most searched keywords.
The data it gives you is very commonly overestimated. This is quite possibly one of the biggest issues with the Keyword Planner. Ahrefs did a big case study involving 72,000+ keywords, and they found that a whopping 91% of them were overestimated, often (54% of the time) by a significant margin, in the Keyword Planner data. Some keywords (14%) had 4x more listed impressions than in reality!
The problem comes from how Google actually works. See, Google hasn’t relied on specific matching keywords in many years. They have a whole host of semantic indexing and meaning-behind-the-words analysis driving their search results. That’s why you can search for a phrase and get results that are about the same topic but don’t include that phrase at all. In fact, this is a common point of frustration among those of us who remember how to get the old Google to do what we wanted; a lot of those techniques no longer really work.
Sometimes, this is a good thing – for example, it’s a way to avoid typos being unique keywords – but Google isn’t all-knowing, so they can lump things together that they shouldn’t. Ahrefs uses the example of “Chusky,” which Google assumes is a typo of Husky and lumps together with it, but is actually a crossbreed of Husky and Chow Chow dogs; it’s a specific breed and keyword you would probably want real data on.
On the back end, these keywords end up with overestimated data because Google’s algorithm is basically just lumping a bunch of keywords together, even if you specify exact matches.
It’s an extremely popular free tool. Virtually nothing you get out of the Google Keyword Planner is really unique or, frankly, all that useful in my experience. Since it’s a tool made for PPC, it’s most useful for PPC ads. That’s an area where having the same data as everyone else is important to make decisions. For organic SEO, you’re looking for a competitive advantage using data other people don’t have access to, and you really can’t get that from the Keyword Planner.
The truth is that using the Google Keyword Planner for organic SEO planning is a holdover from the days when there weren’t any other options besides guessing and watching your own metrics. When you have to hammer in a nail, and all you have is a rock, you use the rock, but when hammers and nail guns are readily available, you don’t need to keep using the rock.
Alternatives to the Google Keyword Planner for Bulk Keyword Searches
If you want to search for organic SEO data in bulk, whether you’ve got a keyword list to start or you’re just trying to pull keyword ideas from competitors, there are a bunch of other valid options you can use today.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. This is one of the better big data keyword monitors out there. Ahrefs identified many of the problems with the Keyword Planner tool and fixed them in their own tool, which can be used for both PPC and organic SEO research. They also allow you to make clusters yourself or avoid them entirely if you want.
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool. I’ve thought that Semrush is perhaps the best, most accurate big keyword research tool on the market today, and I have yet to find a reason to change my mind. Semrush in general is probably one of my top five favorite marketing tools in general, so if you have the budget for it, definitely go for it.
Topicfinder. I made Topicfinder less as a general keyword research tool and more as a specific topic ideation tool with actionable reports. I was tired of tabbing between different tools and copy-pasting data back and forth just to come up with a few weekly blog post ideas, so I refined this app to do it for me.
The end result is something I’m very proud of, so check it out and let me know what you think!
Leave a Comment
Fine-tuned for competitive creators
Topicfinder is designed by a content marketing agency that writes hundreds of longform articles every month and competes at the highest level. It’s tailor-built for competitive content teams, marketers, and businesses.
Get Started