There are several tools that you can use to for a keyword research. Each has its own advantage and disadvantage. Some of them are free and some you need to pay a monthly fee.

Google is offering one of the free keyword research tools that you can use. From my experience it’s a very useful tool. If you use it correctly you can extract a list of hundreds and thousands of keywords.
In this post I am not going to write a review about Google keyword tool but to show you how I use its output to try to predict which of the keywords will gain profit.
On top of it, I am going to investigate the correlation between Google “Average Search Volume” and the actual traffic that I am getting in order to try to calculate the potential profit for other projects.

A good keyword research will imply about the chances to drive cheep traffic to a website that was optimized for those keywords. A keyword research is always recommended for both organic and PPC traffic.

This post is focused on PPC. I will leave the organic issue to another post.

To make it simpler, let’s use an example. Suppose that I am doing a keywords research about the phrase “making money online”. Using the Google tool I can get lost of keywords. For each keyword I will get the “Estimated Avg. CPC” & the “Average Search Volume”.

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As you can see in the screenshot, we get a scale that implies about the amount of traffic that we will get. Google does not tell us the meaning of this value in terms of number of users. There is no real number that we can use in our calculations.
More than that, it doesn’t give us the option to compare between keywords or group of keywords.

My last sentence is not completely accurate. You can get some number that describes this scale. In order to do so you will need to export the output to a file. But again, what does this number means? When Google mentioning 0.03 next to a specified keyword, what doesn’t it mean?

At this point we will not try to understand its meaning in terms of number of users but I will show you how you can use this number to get some interesting information about your niche.

I use the same techniques to gather a list of almost 2000 keywords. For this list I extract the information using the Google tool. I exported the data to excel file.
Since it’s a long list of keywords I divided the keywords into categories (For each category I will create a separate landing page).

I summarized all the numbers, putting the keywords into two main categories: keywords with average CPC of $0.05 and keyword with average CPC bigger than $0.05.
For each category I also summarized the Average Search Volume. Below is my output.

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As you can see, in most cases the percentage of traffic that you should get from the cheap keywords is bigger that the expensive keywords. Only one category has more traffic from the expensive keyword, but note to the fact that for this category the number of keyword is also the same.
This keywords table explains in a very clear way the long tail principle and the importance of good keyword research. If you use this kind of approach you know where to put your effort.

What you cannot deduce from this keywords table is the traffic volume in terms of users.
I am going to check those numbers and compare them to the actual traffic that I will get. Maybe I will find the coefficient to convert Google values to number of users.
Its not going to be easy and I would probably need lots of data before I will be able to come up with something. But it’s worth the try.

I will keep you posted with my finding.

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