Today I start a mini-series about the realities and fallacies high-paying keywords and keyword lists. I've covered some of this before, but from what I've seen lately I need to cover this topic again.
Many AdSense publishers find themselves on a quest to find high-paying keywords and to build sites around those keywords. The idea, of course, is to make more money by targeting those high-paying keywords, because even a site with little traffic but a good conversion ratio can make decent money if the ad payouts are high enough. (Let's not get sidetracked by the “Made For AdSense” discussion about why publishers build sites… I've already covered this in some detail before.)
There are many vendors out there willing to satisfy that demand, of course. Just type in “high paying keywords” in any search engine and you'll see many, many sites offering keyword lists. Some free, some not-so-free… See, for example, AdSenseAdWords.com (no, that's not an affiliate link or anything), which updates its list of keywords weekly. As I write this, “call conference pricing” is #1 in its list at $81.47, followed closely by “call conference vendor” at $81.10.
Egads! you're thinking. Do advertisers really pay $80 per click? Well, no. But we'll get to that issue tomorrow. Let's talk about how these lists are created, though.
There are two kinds of keyword lists that are of interest:
- Keyword popularity
- Keyword pricing
Popularity is important because you want to know how often people are searching for specific terms. Pricing is important because you want to know how much people are paying for specific terms. But each type of keyword data is collected differently.
Keyword popularity is hard to get unless you're a search engine and can see what people are searching for. Generally the people generating keyword popularity lists have a “meta-crawler” of some kind, basically a layer on top of one or more search engines that logs the search requests but then passes them to one or more search engines for processing. If they get enough traffic (and there's a big “if”) then they can start ordering searches. They might even be able to extrapolate the popularity of various phrases based on what they know about the different keywords in their databases.
Keyword pricing is much easier to get. All you need is to hire a programmer to write a script that goes and crawls one of the big advertising services. For example, you could create an AdWords account and then write a script that logs in as you and “scrapes” the traffic estimator pages to gather information about keyword pricing. The trick is to do it often enough to be relevant (because keyword pricing changes daily) while not getting noticed by the advertising service (whose terms ban the use of such crawlers/scripts/scrapers). Ultimately, though, all the keyword lists are getting their data from the same places! So a free list might be just as useful as a $100 list… then again, the free list might have been generated a year ago and is probably totally irrelevant… or maybe it was generated last week and the $100 list was generated last year… This is why you need to ask questions of the keyword list vendor…
Tomorrow we'll look more closely at those keyword pricing lists…
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.
Trackbacks /
Pingbacks