The best keyword research involves many things, keyword popularity, keyword competitiveness and whether there you can monetize that keyword.
The Best Keyword
Ideally your key word would have 10 million searches a day, no other websites with that key word and a hundred different Adsense ads paying $200 a click.
There’s no such animal.
Any key word that is popular and pays well is snapped up by thousands of large websites immediately.
The Best Keyword For a New Website To Target
Best means the one that will earn you the most money.
How much any particular search term will earn for you depends on a range of factors:
- How popular that search keyword is (Number of Searches)
- How much Adsense advertisers are willing to pay (Click Value)
- How high your site can rank for that search term
- The proportion of searchers who will click on the top search results
- How many of the searchers are likely to click on an Adsense Ad
- Whether you can use Amazon to target your keyword
- Whether you can use any other monetization programs with your keyword
This article will deal with the first three of these factors using free software tools.
How much a particular keyword earns from Adsense can be calculated by this formula:
number of searches X Adsense click value
You can earn just as much from a low paying search term if it is something that lots of people click on.
Researching Keyword Popularity and Adsense Competition
Adsense Competition
Adsense competition is a measure that Google uses to show how many advertisers want a particular search term to bring up their ads. The more competing advertisers want a given search string to show their ads, the more they will have to pay.
Advertizers will pay more to have their ads to show if the ad is for a high profit margin service or product. Lawyers pay highly to show their ads on any page to do with injury or with legal implications because they can potentially make a massive profit from a given click. If only one lawyer wants his ad to show for a particular keyword then he will not pay much, it is only because hundreds of lawyers are competing to show their ads that the price goes up.
Keyword Popularity
There are many free tools available to you to find out how many people search for a particular term. Start with Google’s own tool for Adsense.
Log into your Adsense account, Click on the Reporting Tab, Click Keyword Tool
Click Advanced Options, Scroll up to All Countries
Now enter a search term, scroll down the page slightly and click Search.
Enter Fireplaces as your Search term (key word)
The results are listed in order of relevance to your keyword.
They show 550,000 people searched for fireplaces and the bar under Competition is nearly all the way across. This shows that any site that can feature in search results for fireplaces will do well.
- Click on the blue fireplaces link in the left column. A new window will open up. The exact search results that show in this window will vary depending on where you live and how particular websites are promoting themselves, but your new site cannot compete with any of these sites. Forget fireplaces as a key word.
- Go back to your results page and click Global Monthly Searches to reorder the results in order of decreasing number of searches.
- Scroll down the results until you reach Amish Fireplaces, you may need to go onto page 2. The competition bar for Amish fireplaces shows it is a high paying key word, yet there are still around 10,000 global searches every month. Click the blue Amish fireplaces link. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results. https://www.amish-furniture-home.com/browse-by-category/fireplaces shows up, this is a Google PR=0 page, so you have a chance.
- Go back, check the couple of results above the bottom https://www.discoverfireplacedesigns.com/ and https://ezinearticles.com/?Amish-Fireplaces—5-Tips-For-Buying-the-Right-Amish-Fireplace&id=1211527v are the next two results, both also have a zero Google page rank
- Amish Fireplaces looks like an excellent keyword. Don’t try for it though, because hundreds of people are reading this and if 10 people go for it the results could change dramatically.
This is the process using the free Google Adsense keyword tool. You also need to have a browser plugin that shows you the Google Page Rank of any page you are on. I use the SEObook.com toolbar for Firefox, a free download. The whole process takes you about 30 minutes.