Keyword Research and making money with AdSense

Keyword reaserch is the key to making money in niche sites with AdSense. I have heard this over and over for years without really getting it.

As part of my summer affiliate marketing projects, I’m working on forcing myself to understand how to effectively do keyword research. Just one week into the projects, I can tell a big reason why I am not making more money with AdSense which is the main way that I make money on most of my sites. And even better, I’m starting to learn how to fix that.

Do Page Views and SERPS mean AdSense money
I rank well on some somewhat common search terms on each of my sites. I always thought that was pretty cool. I’m learning that these visits are pretty useless for making money with AdSense because advertisers are not advertising on those keywords.

A couple examples
I’m on the first page of Google for the search term “Getting married on a cruise.” This one post makes enough to pay for more than just the domain name each year with the little bit of traffic it gets. The Google Keyword Tool says that “getting married on a cruise” has an average CPC for the advertiser of $2.03

Another post from that same site ranks #1 for “things to do on first night of cruise” which the AdWords Keyword Tool says has an average CPC of nothing. I believe it. They get about the same amount of traffic but I don’t get any clicks on that one. It’s a perfectly fine post and is useful for getting people to my site but it does nothing for actually making any money.

Why?

Because nobody is using AdWords to advertise anything that has to do with “things to do on first night of cruise.”

Balance the reader and the advertisers
The key to making money with AdSense on a niche blog is to write content that connects readers with advertisers. Most people, myself included, tend to get lazy and just write content that makes themselves happy or content that tries to connect to a reader. But forgetting to consider the advertisers kills any potential for making money.

Enter Keyword Research
Spending 10-15 minutes doing research on a post can make the difference between a post that ranks well in Google for some keywords and one that ranks well and earns you money. Google’s own Keyword Tool is a great resource for finding out how competitive a term is, a ball park of what the CPC for the advertisers is, an estimate on what kind of traffic it could bring and optional keywords that might work bring more traffic and earn more AdSense revenue.

Before hitting publish on your next post, copy the content into the Keyword Tool. Choose the Website content radio button and then paste the text in the “Or, enter your own text in the box below” and then click Get keyword ideas.

Google will give you a list of keywords that your article could fit.

Make sure you choose the option to show the Advertiser Competition, Estimated Average CPC and Global Monthly Search Volume. If the competition is too high or if the CPC or search volume is too low, you might want to consider targeting some other keywords from the list.

If nothing from the list sounds like a good fit, choose the Descriptive words option and start experimenting with some alternate keywords until you find something you like.

Once you find your magic keyword phrase, make sure to do things like include the phrase in the title, early in the post and one or two more times in the rest of the post, in the anchor text of a link, and the alt attribute on an image, etc. But then make your post read like you are not focusing on the content you were planning on writing and not just on the keywords.

I am still working on effectively optimizing the keywords to make the readers, Google and the advertisers all happy. It is definitely a balancing act.

Here are a great resource for getting started with SEO in general and optimizing a post for a keyword.