WHAT IS A KEYWORD?

First things first.  A keyword is a word, or phrase, that people type into search engines to find things.  If I want to find information about digital photography, then I go to Google and type in digital photography.  Simple, right?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT KEYWORDS?

If you have a website and you want visitors to find your site when they use Google, Bing or Yahoo, then you need to figure out what keywords people are using that are related to your website.

Once you find good keywords for your market, then you can target those keywords and start to optimize your website for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO).  We’ll get into SEO later.  Right now, let’s focus on keywords.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a photography website and you sell an ebook teaching people how to take good pictures.  You want to find out what people are typing in at Google so you can target those keywords and get potential buyers to your website.

Use common sense and think about what people might type in at Google if they want to learn how to take good pictures.  For example, “how to take good pictures,” “digital photography course,” or “digital photography tips.”  These are keywords that people might type in at Google to find related websites.

THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

An awesome free tool to use for keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool.  It gives you keywords, competition, local monthly search volume, global monthly search volume and more.

If you go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in the 3 phrases I mentioned above, you’ll see the results below (I customized the search type and settings, which I will show you how to do in a free video coming soon).

Let’s start with the competition column.  First thing you should notice is that the 3 keyword phrases have different levels of competition.  The competition bar is just a general indicator of how competitive that keyword is.

When I say competitive, that generally means – how many websites are trying to rank for the top spot and how many people are trying to buy ads based on that keyword?

One thing I didn’t mention previously is that people who buy ads through Google AdWords (the ads that appear on search results) also target keywords.  They choose what keywords they want their ads to show up for.  When someone types in that keyword, the ad shows up.

That’s why if you look at the image above, on the far right hand side, you’ll see Estimated Avg. CPC (cost per click).  That is the average price people are paying every time someone clicks on their ad.  If it’s low (for example .05) that means pretty much no one is buying ads for that keyword.  That’s a good indication that it’s not a profitable keyword.  If the CPC is very high, then that indicates that it’s a profitable keyword and people are making money from that keyword.  Although, there are always exceptions to the rules.

Before we get back to the keywords above, you should understand that some keywords will be profitable and some won’t.  Find the keywords that indicate a person is ready to buy.  Buying keywords are profitable.  Avoid the people that are in the research phase.  Those are not profitable.

For example, do you think this person is ready to spend money if they type in “online digital photography course?”  Yes.  That’s a good buying keyword.  That’s why in the image above, you can see it only gets 260 local searches per month, but people are still willing to pay an avg CPC of $7.69.  Focus on keywords that indicate a person is ready to spend money.

In the image above, the competition is very different for the 3 keyword phrases.  These are general indicators, but if you hover your mouse over the green bar, Google will tell you low, medium or high competition.  They can be helpful to an extent, but we won’t be making any decisions based on that information.

Let’s look at the first keyword phrase – “how to take good pictures.”  The competition for this is low, based on Google’s green bar.  The avg CPC is also pretty low compared to the others.  These factors suggest that this might not be a profitable keyword even though it gets a good amount of traffic.

Another indicator that this is not a good keyword is that the keyword phrase is very broad.  It doesn’t specify digital camera or film camera.  It’s just a very broad phrase and that person could be looking at a lot of different things.  This person may not be ready to buy because they’re still in the research phase.

This might be a good keyword to try if you’re using Google AdSense.  That way they don’t have to buy anything and you could still make money when they click on your ads.  If you compare this phrase to “online digital photography course,” you should be able to see the difference between the two.

One is very broad and the other is very specific and focused.  If you have a website that offers an online digital photography course, you might get a few bites if you target the broad phrase, but your conversions will likely be much better if you target the latter phrase.

Monthly search volume is important, of course.  You want to get a good amount of traffic  so you can make money but the more traffic, the more competitive the market is.  The key is to find the hidden gems that have a lot of traffic with little competition.

Some people don’t like to go below 1,000 local search volume.  Some people will go as low as 100 local search volume.  The number isn’t as important as the potential to make money.  If you have a very expensive product for sale, you might not need a ton of traffic.  Personally, I like to stay close to 1,000 minimum.  Go big or go home, as they say.

Even if you get to the number one spot in Google search results, you won’t get 100% of the people clicking through to your site.  It varies by markets and geographic location, but you might expect to get somewhere around 40%-50% of the global search volume visiting your website.

Let’s take a look at “digital photography course,” for example.  If you were number one for that keyword you might get 200 – 300 visitors from that keyword every month (since local is 210 and global is 880.  If you sell a product for $40, with a conversion rate of 2%, then you could potentially make $160 to $240 per month from that keyword.

Remember that the numbers Google provides are estimates.  These are rough estimates that we’re talking about.  You could do worse, you could do better.  I always like to be very conservative with my estimates so that I am pleasantly surprised when I get more traffic and make more money than I thought.  But, it’s important to understand how to interpret the numbers and what to expect based on those numbers when you’re choosing keywords.

NUMBER OF WEBSITES

A lot of people recommend using the number of websites as an indicator of how difficult it would be to rank for a specific keyword.

The idea is that if you go to Google and type in a keyword phrase with quotes around it, that will tell you how many websites have that phrase match.  Some people say that if there are over 10,000 websites, that’s too competitive.  Some say if it’s over 100,000 that’s too many.  I don’t use this method and here’s why.

I’ve made it to the first page of Google fairly quickly for phrases that have returned over 1,000,000 results with the quotes around it.  And, I’ve had trouble ranking for keywords that have returned 11,000 results.  This method doesn’t take into consideration how strong the top 5 results are.  That’s what you should be concerned with, because that’s where you want to be (actually you want to be in the top 3).

QUALITY OF WEBSITES

If you’re looking at a keyword phrase to determine how difficult it’s gonna be to rank in the top 3, you should look at the top results and look at the SEO quality of the websites.

When you look at the  SEO quality, that means you look for the keyword phrase in the url, the title, the meta description and the content on their page.  If the keyword phrase is found in all of those places, it’s an indication that the webpage is well optimized and might be difficult to outrank.

The image above is the search results for digital photography course.  You can see that the top result has a partial match url, the phrase is in the title and the meta description.  The other results are not as strong.  It might be difficult to outrank the first result, but the others might be doable.

In addition to the SEO quality, take a look at the overall quality of the website.  Does it look like a mess?  Is it user-friendly?  Does it have good content?  How are they monetizing the site?

Check out the quality of the site and ask yourself if it looks like a nice site or does it look like a site that you could easily do a better job of creating.

PAGERANK

After I click on the link for the first webpage, we can look at a few more things that are signals for how difficult it would be to rank for this keyword.  One factor is Pagerank.

Pagerank (PR) is a number, from 0 to 10, assigned by Google to indicate the general strength of a webpage.  In this case, the website is a PR 5, which is a strong site.  That’s another indication that this page will be hard to beat for that keyword.

If you see webpages at the top of search results with PR1 and PR2, that’s a good sign because it will be much easier to outrank those pages.  When you get to PR3 and up, it becomes a little more difficult depending on how well those pages are optimized for search engines.
PR isn’t everything though.

Just because a webpage is a PR5 doesn’t mean that it’s optimized for the specific keyword you’re researching.  If you look at the search results, it’s not in order of PR, it’s in the order that Google determines based on over 200 signals.  A PR2 webpage can rank number 1 for a keyword while a PR 5 website is ranked number 10.  Use PR as one factor, NOT the ultimate factor.

On a side note, you can check the PR of any webpage (as well as backlinks and more) if you install the free toolbar from SEO Book on your Firefox browser.  They have awesome free tools at SEO Book, including Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox and the SEO toolbar.

BACKLINKS

The number of backlinks to a webpage, as well as the quality of those backlinks is another indication of how hard it would be to outrank any particular webpage.

For example, the digital photography course webpage has over 2,000 backlinks to the domain and over 1,000 backlinks to the page.  That may seem like a lot of backlinks but the quality of those backlinks is much more important.  Many websites build backlinks through commenting on blogs, so those would be low-quality links that would be fairly easy to outrank.

I’m not gonna get into how to research backlinks at this point, because there are different tools and different methods and that could be an article in itself (and probably will be).  The thing to remember is that when you’re choosing a keyword, consider the number and quality of the backlinks of the webpages that you’ll be trying to outrank.

MARKET RESEARCH

Market research is an important part of selecting a market to enter, as well as a part of choosing good keyword phrases.  The more you know about your market, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to offer something of value to them.  The bottom line is that to make money online you have to provide people something of value that they’re willing to pay for.

The more you focus in on what the market really wants and how you can fill that void, the easier it will be for you to succeed.

Check out the top websites in the market.  Visit forums.  Find out what people are talking about.  Find out what kind of things they’re interested in.  Specifically, look for questions that people ask over and over again.  If you can answer those questions, turn it into a product and charge money for it, you’ll be on your way to making money online.

CONCLUSION

Don’t let this step scare you.  The more experience you have, the easier it will be to choose good keywords.  Even when you do have experience, sometimes you’ll still be surprised by how difficult it is to rank for some keywords and how easy it is to rank for other keywords.

If you’re really unsure of how to choose a good keyword phrase, choose the least competitive keyword you can find in the market you’re looking at.  Optimize your website for that keyword.  Build backlinks and watch what it takes to get to the top spot in Google.

Once you make it there, you build confidence, you learn what to do and you can move up to a more competitive keyword with more traffic.  The key is to choose a keyword, stick with it and move forward.

What do you find difficult about choosing keywords?