Guide to Keyword Research

I decided I had to dedicate a whole post to keyword research, and why it's the most important thing you can do for yourself. This is something I wish I had known when I began starting blogs and using adsense, so don't take this advice lightly.

Things that are obvious when you begin making money online: (at least they were to me)

• You want a keyword that gets a lot of traffic. This is self explanatory. The more people who search for your keyword, the more traffic you will ultimately get and the more adsense clicks you will get. If your keyword only gets 1000 searches a month, first of all you'll only get a fraction of that traffic, and only a fraction of the traffic you get will click on ads. Use the google keyword tool to find out how much traffic a keyword gets.
  
• You want a keyword that has minimum competition. If you know anything about making money with niche sites and adsense, you should already know this. It's not hard to figure out how much competition there is out there. There are two things I do to determine competition. First I google search my keyword and I look at how many results come up. Second I check the first 4 results on the google SERPs and check their PR. I want all of the pages to have a PR of 3 and lower. If over 2 of them have a PR4 or higher, I scratch the keyword and go back to my drawing board.

So to sum this up so far, we want a healthy ratio of traffic to competition. Traffic>competition=healthy.

Things you might not know about keyword research: (things I didn't know but wish I had)

• Keyword CPC. When I started out, I didn't know that google had different CPC for different keywords. There is a huge range out there - from $0.05 to $50. You usually make half of the CPC at most. My first successful blog that I started was about six months ago now, and when I started it I didn't know about CPC or how to find it out. I chose a keyword that gets a lot of traffic, and is fairly competitive but has a lot of long tail keywords that fall into the same niche that get good traffic, as well. I worked hard on getting my site up in the SERPS and was pretty successful at doing so. I get good traffic and am fairly pleased with how I've done. I average between 15-25 Adsense clicks a day. You might be thinking that that's great considering I only put in about three real months of work into it, spent in total under $100 on it, and I didn't really know what I was doing. The problem: my keyword has an extremely low CPC. The highest CPC for a keyword that falls into my niche is under $2.00. The average is probably around $0.50. For the 15-25 clicks I get a day, I make an average of $3.50. That's about $100 a month. Sure, it'll keep growing and doing better, and I'm not complaining. I learned a lot from this blog and will keep pushing it with more and better keywords now that I know how to do keyword research properly. But I can't help thinking, if I had known before what I know now I wouldn't have chosen this niche. If I was even making $1 per click, (which is still on the low side) I would have a very successful little blog.
  
• If you rank for one keyword, it will be easier to rank for the others in the SERPs. Once you are on top of the SERPs for a keyword, the google bot will crawl your page more often and give more juice to your entire site. This makes it easier to get new pages indexed right away (for my most successful blog my new pages are usually indexed within the hour that I publish them). It will give new keywords more juice.

So now that I've told you the main things I'm looking for in a keyword, I should probably tell you how I go about doing this.
The google keyword tool is key. Become familiar with it, it's your best friend, your brother from another mother, your lover...you get the point. Basically what you want to do is as follows. Go to the google keyword tool. Type in your keyword, make sure "use synonyms" is checked and click "get keyword ideas". Now a chart will appear. The important columns are keywords, estimated average CPC, and global monthly search volume. If you don't see estimated average CPC, don't worry, this is expected. Go to the "choose columns to display" and click on the drop down menu and click on "show estimate average CPC". Now you should see it. While your at the drop down menu, why don't you hide the advertiser competition as well as the local monthly search volume. Now you want to go to "match type" drop down menu that will be on your right next to the "global monthly search volume". It will be on "broad" change it to "exact". This will give you the stats for people searching for the exact keywords and it's more accurate. This should set you up well to start doing keyword research. For a more detailed approach, checkout the keyword academy. It will cost you $1 for your first month and the information you will get is worth well over what you are going to pay.

Good luck with your keyword research and come back soon for more making money online for beginners!