Ranking Keywords by Profitability
If you have been diligently doing some good keyword research for your chosen niche then you will probably have a whole bunch of keywords that are viable and worth targeting. If you have more keywords than you have time to deal with right now, how do you choose between them?
What Makes a Good Keyword?
In my video on keyword research I identified three major traits that I was looking for in a potential keyword. These are:
- Good volume of traffic potential
- Low enough competition to be able to rank highly
- Good AdSense CPC
This is the first time that I have used AdSense CPC in the equation. In the past I only ever really look at traffic and competition and I used to rank keywords solely by one of those two factors. So I’d either start with the highest traffic keyword or the lowest competition.
What is Profitability?
Now that I am building sites primarily designed for AdSense, the CPC value becomes a factor. The competition value is important but it is not going to directly affect how much money can be made from a particular keyword but the other two factors will. More traffic = more revenue and higher CPC = more revenue, or at least you hope so. With AdSense, the CPC is only an average value and is just an indicator (as with everything really), however if one keyword has a CPC of $0.50, another is $5.00 and another is $50.00 then potentially each has ten times the profit potential of the last one.
Therefore I consider the profitability factor to be simply:
Traffic x AdSense CPC
I export my keywords from Market Samurai and put them into a spreadsheet then I add a column to multiply together the traffic and CPC values. This comes up with a number and vaguely that would mean the maximum you could earn from that keyword in a day. Of course the numbers are rather high and I wouldn’t expect to actually get that, especially not in the beginning but the actual number itself is not so important as its relativity to the other keywords.
In other words, I sort on this profitability value and pick the top one as the keyword to start working with first. It still doesn’t necessarily work out that way but its a nice easy way of making a decision that is based on numbers without having to agonise indefinitely.
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kahthan
October 8, 2008
nice post caroline, i did a similar post a while back, its amazing how we seem to be writing roughly the same things at the same time, i guess thats one of the things that brings me to read your blog everyday. awesome stuff!
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