How Do You Define A Great Keyword?
How do you differentiate between a potentially good and a potentially bad keyword? Its not a particularly difficult question to answer. Basically it all boils down to whether a keyword phrase is one that will make you money or not! After all, there is no point in targeting keywords that will get a lot of search traffic, if the traffic generated does not want to spend any cash at your site!
There are a number of attributes I look at when doing my Keyword Research.
Profit Potential
What I mean by profit potential is the likelihood that someone searching on a particular keyword phrase will actually spend money based on the results they get. If their search phrase includes a specific product name or model number they are again more likely to be in a buying frame of mind. Also the more the person searching needs a solution to their problem, the more likely they.
Try and put yourself in the mind of the searcher when evaluating potential search phrases. Consider the thought process of the person. Are they looking to buy or just do research? Are they feeling emotional, vulnerable or desperate?
A good indication of the profit potential of a keyword phrase is how much PPC advertisers are prepared to pay to advertise on the phrase. The higher the PPC figure, the more likely you will be able to make money from the keyword.
Traffic
Unless you are using software to automatically generate hundreds of web pages or blog posts, you want to identify keywords that get reasonable search volumes each month. By reasonable I would say around 500 or more searches each month. I personally target keywords with a minimum of 2,000 monthly searches for my niche site homepages and 500 for other pages or posts. If you use content automation software that instantly generates hundreds or thousands of pages, you can obviously target keywords with very small monthly search figures, because 1,000 pages each getting 10 searches per month is nice traffic!
Competition
The competition for a keyword is measured typically by how many other pages are competing or optimised for your targeted keyword phrase. Optimised pages are what you need to be interested in. I use page title analysis to evaluate competition. This provides me with a good indication of how big the real competition is for the phrase, as I know that people have actually optimised for the term. How well you can rank will depend on how many backlinks you are able to accumulate. The higher you want to rank for your term, the more links you will need pointing in to your content.
So in summary, profit potential, search volumes and competition should be the attributes you use to choose your keyword phrases to optimise your sites around. I use Keyword Elite to automate my research of all three criteria, click on the link to see how I use it …
