Google Adsense Top Paying Keywords and How To Properly Research Them

It's easy enough to look up a Google Adsense top paying keyword. But, do you have the research on that keyword that will really help you manage a pay per click campaign or set up a keyword rich niche website?

Let's take a high Adsense paying keyword, the word "loan."

The word "loan" has a CPC or cost per click of $14.52. Looks pretty good you say?

It also has 18,540 clicks per month or people who click on Adsense ads under the keyword: loan.

There are 152 Adword sponsors for the word loan. On average they pay $3.00 per click on the word. The advertiser at the top of the results list will pay the full $14.52, however, the next highest paying Adwords user could be paying $5.00 per click. The third site in the ad listings could be paying $0.75 a click. So, there's never a guarantee that you will get highest payout available for an Adsense click.

Conversely, for an Adwords campaign, if you want to be in the first page of Google for a sponsored result, you'll have to pay a premium, since you're competing against 152 other sponsors for a top slot in the ad results.

If you are building a website, you need to know that there are 1,010,000 websites that are SEO optimized for the word loan. By this, I mean that out of the 208,000,000 sites that Google returns in its search results for the word loan, 1,010,000 of them have the word "loan" in their title, anchor text and keyword meta tags.

Meta tags and how to use them warrant an article on it's own. In brief, meta tags are the part of web page code that contain the title of your page, a description of your page and the keywords of your page. Due to the abuse that meta tag spammers have used to rate high in search results, the search engines discount these, however some search engines do use them to pull descriptions of your websites. And different search engines use different methods to come up with their search results. There should be a correlation between your meta tags and the content of your page.

300,000 competitors will not necessarily keep you from getting a top-ranking site on Google. Trying to compete against over 1 million serious and optimized competitors on a keyword is, to say the least, a little daunting.

The next piece of research is done using a Firefox toolbar with an SEO plugin. (I resisted switching toolbars for the longest time, and I now use box Firefox for all research.)

Go to Google and search the term loan.

The first three results on the page are: eLoan, Wikipedia and GovLoans.gov. The last place on the results page is held by finaid.org/loans/.

Although over million search results are listed, for me it comes down to these 4 results. Why?

Most people never leave the first page of search results when they are searching and most people don't look beyond the first three results, depending on what the search term is and what the results are. Chances are if you are looking for a loan, you would click on eLoans, that you wouldn't click on Wikipedia, and that you might click on GovLoans.gov. I always look at the last result on the page to see if there is a chance to beat the odds and knock the result to the next page.

And just a note to the web savvy - you're exactly that, web savvy. Your search patterns are not those of the average user. Some people still can't figure out how to get Google set up as their search engine of choice. Stop talking to other web wise people and start asking questions of people you meet who are NOT in the web business. In other words - your end users.

Let's look at these 4 in order through Firefox's SEO plugin.

If you are going to be doing keyword research, you should know the following information:

Page Rank - Google's Page Rank of a webpage or site. The Higher the better

Age - The age the site started. (You can buy an expired web site and this would show up as one with a greater age.)

Y! Links - Yahoo links.

Y! Edu Links - Yahoo links for sites registered as .edu or educational sites. .Edu sites are considered authority sites.

Y! Gov Links - Yahoo links for sites registered as .gov or government sites.

.Gov sites are considered authority sites.

DMOZ - OPD/Open Directory Project. Human edited directory used by Google and Alexa. Is considered an authority site. Please read as much as you can before submitting your site to DMOZ.

Sites with greater age and authority sites pass more "juice" to the ranking engines. SEO authories disagree what's important and what's not important. I deliberately did not list del.icio.is information to these stats. Social networking deserves its own article and cannot be done justice here.

eLoan:

Page Rank - 5 Age - 1998

Y! Links - 20,700

Y! Edu Links - 167

Y! Gov Links - 3

DMOZ - 8

WikiPedia:

Page Rank - 7

Age - 2001

Y! Links - 34,000,000

Y! Edu Links - 326,000

Y! Gov Links - 16,400

DMOZ - 20,400

GovLoan.gov:

Page Rank - 6 Age - 2004

Y! Links - 17,200

Y! Edu Links - 97

Y! Gov Links - 188 DMOZ - 1

finaid.org/loans/:

Page Rank - 7 Age - 1996

Y! Links - 158,000

Y! Edu Links - 31,800

Y! Gov Links - 655

DMOZ - 19

Looking at these four sites, you can see that you would not want to compete on the word “loan.”

Simply getting the links and authority links (.gov and .edu) would take several years. Google actually looks at sites that acquire a high number of links in a short period of time. A few thousand over the course of a year is natural. Tens of thousands is not.

Is there a way around this? Yes there is. There are what are know as "long tailed keywords" or "keyword phrases."

Trying to rank well for the word "loan" might take more time and effort than it's worth. But, people also search in phrases or in questions. So you might have less competition with phrases like "advance cash online loan" or "low home equity loan rates."

However, the whole "loan" keyword and most of its categories are pretty well played out and you'll have enough direct competitors, who have been around long enough and have enough links and authority links, that it will take you years to level the playing field. Many of us simply do not have the right kinds of tools or leverage to pull off ranking well for a keyword like "loan."

So, what can you do? First of all, don't be greedy. Find a good keyword that will return $1.00 to $7.00. If you anticipate huge amounts of traffic and click through, a good keyword can be under $5.00

The advice to start a website based on something you're an expert in, something you're passionate about, or a hobby, is advice that's well worth considering. If you build a website based on your interests, chances are you won't run out of steam while you're building it, and you already have most of the content in your head.

Do not build a MFA or made for Adsense site. You know the sites, all they seem to do is to have advertising and Google search results posted on them. Now, web developers you are in competition with, will report you to Adsense. Your Adsense account will be closed, and your website banned. You’ll never see any of the money you made.

The keyword for your site may not be worth $14.52 a click, but a steady stream of visitors at a dollar or three a click is nothing to sneeze at.

If you can build a website that produces results for you based on keywords you research on something you're passionate about, you can turn around and do it again.

So, it pays to do the research on Google Adsense top paying keywords, but do all the research. The time you spend will be well invested.