How to Select Keywords For Internet Marketing

Keywords are the common thread in Internet Advertising / Marketing. The person sitting in front of a computer thinks about keywords that they will use to search for information or products. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the supplier describes the information or product in terms of Ad words, another form of keywords. So the Internet marketeer must also think in terms of keywords, if they hope to participate in the transaction. To often we Internet Marketeers think only of the product and what we might earn from promoting such a product, without regard to the source of the transaction. I'm always surprised when doing keyword research, at the volume and the amount paid to advertise a given keyword. Keywords that I would have guessed were searched for a million times a month turn out to be searched for very little. Also, I find what I consider high demand keywords that indeed have high volume, but the amount paid per click for this traffic is small.

When I do keyword research, I often start it because I saw a sign board or a TV advertisement that had a catchy keyword or keyword phrase that I liked. If I'm just looking for new ideas, I will go to Amazon or E-Bay and just look at the items for sale. A keyword can be anything you can imagine. Then with a few single word keywords in mind, I use the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool to check volumes and what advertisers are paying for the keyword and related keyword phrases. I start by entering the first keyword and then I configure the tool for my research. The changes I make to the configuration are as Follows: I change the Match Type drop-down to Exact; Under Show / Hide Columns, I click hide advertiser competition and hide local search volume. Under Show / Hide Columns, I click show average CPC. The CPC is the amount the advertiser pays Google per click for this keyword.

So now I enter single keywords that I found in the step where I was looking for ideas. I enter single keywords because the keyword tool will give you all kinds of related phrases that you might not have thought about. If you enter a 2 – 3 word phrase you could miss out on a really good phrase. So the tool gives me a list of keywords and related phrases, about 150 of them, and the cost per click of each. If I like the volumes and click value I can save them in a spreadsheet by simply scrolling down to the end of the column and clicking the csv for excel link. I generally repeat this process until I have at least one thousand keywords and phrases in my spreadsheet.

The last step in keyword gathering is to calculate the potential monthly income from each keyword. I add a column to the spreadsheet called Monthly Potential. I know that I can expect to get about 25% of the amount that the advertiser pays Google per click. Sometimes it's a bit more or less, but that's a pretty good number. My objective is to find a keyword or phrase with which I can achieve number one ranking on Googles search result page. For the rest of my calculation I assume I can rank number one for each keyword. If I rank number one, I can expect to get about 40% of the monthly click volume. I also can expect to convert about 5% of that traffic into a click from my site. So I create an Excel formula that looks like this. = ((B2 * 0.25) * (C2 * 0.4 * 0.05)) I copy this formula into all the cells in the monthly potential column in the spreadsheet. This tells me what the monthly income potential is for each keyword. Now you have an economic basis for keyword selection. I hope this will help you with your selection of proper keywords.