The Keyword Planner is a combination of the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator tool and aims to make it easier to get through the process of creating new ad groups and campaigns - but we can still use it to estimate organic search traffic for the same keywords.

The Keyword Planner has an optimized interface.

The first step in the process is to determine how you're going to go about creating your ad campaigns and ad groups, using one of 4 possible paths:

• Search for Keyword and Ad Group Ideas
• Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups
• Get traffic estimates for a list of keywords
• Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas

For our purposes, we're going to stick to the first option.

Clicking on this option opens a drop down menu which allows you to enter multiple keywords and set targeting parameters.

With this interface, the Keyword Planner lets you test keywords using any or all of the available methods: by keyword, by landing page, and by product category.

Applying Filters And Customizing

Additionally, there are robust filtering capabilities (on the right hand side). For example, you can filter keywords based on the following ways:

• Average CPC: include or exclude keywords that are within or outside of a desired Cost Per Click
• Estimated Search Volume: include or exclude keywords that are within or outside of a desired monthly search volume
• Keyword Competition: narrow your list based on estimated competition
• Exclude Keywords Already In Your Account: automatically exclude keywords that are already in your AdWords account to avoid duplicates
• Filter by Keyword: specify to include or exclude keywords containing specific terms

Because keyword research requires analyzing keyword statistics in order to determine whether or not a given keyword makes sense for your business, Google lets you customize the keyword stats and performance estimates so that they're relevant to your campaigns. This means they let you specify targeting parameters such as language, country and search network.

Your Keyword Plan

As you discover promising terms looking at individual keywords or keyword groupings, you have the ability to add them to "Your Plan," which is a temporary storage area for saving interesting-looking keywords and keyword groupings for later.

The Keyword Planner maintains state for the duration of your session- keywords that you add to "Your Plan" are saved while you're in the process of looking for keywords.

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Parts of the above section originally appeared on Search Engine Land