Keyword Research the Right Way

For my Adsense websites I always target long-tail keywords and the website I’m telling you about is no exception. Long tail keywords are made up of three or more words that are more specific than a common 1 or 2 word phrase.

Example:
Short-tail keyword: Coffee Beans
Long-tail keyword: buy Arabica coffee beans
It’s the long-tail keywords that you’ll be targeting for 2 reasons.

1. They are easier to rank for in the search engines, so you will find it much easier to get traffic to your site.

2. People who search long-tail keywords are more likely in general to click on your ads, (there are exceptions but don’t worry about this yet). The percentage of visitors that click on your ad’s is known as CTR% (Click Through Rate).

Think about this. If you’re surfing the web and you type into Google “Coffee Beans”, you may be looking to buy coffee beans but the chances are you don’t really know what you want yet. You are just researching the possibilities.

But if you type in “buy Arabica coffee beans” then it is fairly obvious you want those beans. You’re not messing about, you’re looking for the best place to buy them.

Now, if you were creating a web-page that targeted this niche, which of the phrases above would be easier to rank for? Yep, the long tail phrase. This can be demonstrated with simple numbers.

The term “coffee beans” in Google generates 15.7 million results. Yet the term “buy Arabica coffee beans” only generates 131 thousand results. That’s a lot less competition.

NOW…

This is not a hard and fast rule but there are some good ways of estimating how easy it will be to rank for your target keywords.

Try to target keywords that have lesss than 50,000 competing pages (in quotes) in Google. Also, check out the top 5 results in Google. Make sure they have a low Pagerank – Prefereably not more than PR3 and hopefully at least 1 or 2 results will have a PR1 or less.

It’s also a good idea to see how many incoming links each of these sites have. This will be a good indicator of how much work you need to do in order to outrank them. Google do not report backlinks well so when analysing your competitions back-links go by Yahoo counts. You can MarketLeap for this. So with this knowledge in hand I started my keyword research for my $10k website. This is where most Adsense marketers stumble. They look for long-tail phrases that are easy to rank for but they don’t think about whether the visitor is likely to click on the ads. I knew I wanted to find long-tail keywords that were not only easy to rank for in Google, but would give me a high CTR%.

But if you’re smart this is where you really can clean up. Being smart with your keyword research means the difference between success and failure. Let’s throw a couple of extra factors into the mix.

When choosing the keywords for my sites I look at long-tail and CTR%. I also look at CPC% (Cost Per Click). By targeting long-tail keywords that ALSO have a high CPC% AND a high CTR% I increase my chances of success yet again.

I would rather target a keyword that only received 20 hits per day and had all of the above in it’s favor, than a keyword that received 200 hits per day and didn’t have a high CPC% and CTR%.

So how can you find all this information? Well there are a number of tools out there and Wordtracker tends to be the favourite. Personally I favor Nichebot and I’ll tell you why. Wordtracker gives search counts and competition data but it doesn’t give you CPC%. Nichebot not only gives average CPC% but a whole suite of other tools that will help you choose the right keywords from the start. On top of this it you can get Wordtracker results through it anyway.

Keyword Research

There are dozens of other tools out there that vary in price from free to hundreds of dollars. Some are brilliant, some are worthless – but you’ll have do do your own research on these.

Other research that is worth spending 20-30 minutes on is “multiple revenue streams”. This is how I added around $2000 to the value of my website. Yes, Adsense is a great source of revenue but it’s not the only income stream available. When researching your topic look on places like Amazon, Clickbank, Commission Junction etc. and see what other companies are offering affiliate commissions. In some cases (especially on Clickbank) you can earn up to 75% commission for each sale you refer. Make a note of all these for later.

Now there’s just one more thing to think about when choosing your keywords and then this section is done. This is where you choose your niche. In my experience (and the website I’m telling you about is no exception) you want to find around 8-15 good long-tail keywords that are based around the same niche. So, for example – My website targeted the “PC Anti-Virus” niche.

Rather than choosing (and these are examples only) a set of niche keywords like this…
anti virus downloads
free anti virus
download anti virus free
free anti virus downloads

I would choose a set of niche keywords like this…
anti virus downloads
email spam blockers
pop-up blockers
anti spyware reviews
registry cleaners

You see how they are not repetitive and they focus on the niche as a whole. Not only does this mean more value to the visitor but it means that once I have some statistics to look at – I can expand on these keywords, create new pages and multiply my revenue very easily.