Adsense Keyword Empire Part 2: Keyword Research

Step 2:

Keyword Research

There are a number of keyword research tools on the internet, two which I recommend are SEO Book Keyword Tool and Wordtracker. With these tools, you can enter a keyword and find out how many times on average it is searched for on a daily basis. They also give you suggestions for other keyword phrases with your keyword in it.

Let's use my favorite tool SEO Book Keyword Tool and enter the term "dog".




You can see that the word "dogs" gets 26,133 Google searches daily. That's 783,990 searches per month. Now let's do a Google search to see how many competing sites there are for the word "dogs".



You can see that there are 167,000,000 search results. That is WAYYY too many. Your site, at least its main page, would be buried in a sea of search results. We have to pick a narrower focus. Skimming through the suggested keyword phrases (and ignoring all the obscene ones!), I see "adopt a dog".



That might work. It gets 26,220 searches per month, and if we check in Google (put your search term in quotation marks) we can see that this phrase has 289,000 pages. That's still a lot, but I think it's alright for the website's main page. And it seems flexible. The general theme could be "Adopt a dog", and on each of the many pages we will add you could describe a different breed of dog for the reader to see which breed of dog is best for them. (The "adopt a dog" theme won't really matter much on the subcategory pages--really you could write whatever you want about dogs on each individual page, but having a general theme gives the site a purpose).

Let's look at keywords for some subcategories. Let's research "dalmation".



The term "dalmation" itself gets 401 searches per day (12,030 per month), and there are 1,020,000 Google search results. That's too many search results. I am always looking for less than 1000 search results in Google (remember, in my system we're searching with the keywords in quotation marks. Some people argue against this, but they usually don't make much money from Adsense so I ignore them). Look down at "dalmation breeders". I have a feeling this might work. It gets 990 searches per month, and there are 960 search results. That is borderline ok. I usually want less than 1000 search results (ideally less than 500) and I want the number of monthly searches to be at least double the number of search results. But these numbers are ok, so let's make a note of them and maybe we'll use them.

You may be wondering what "dalmation breeders" has to do with "adopt a dog". Well, you can try to draw a connection between the two topics on your subtopic page, but to be honest it doesn't really matter. With this method, most of your traffic will probably come directly to your subcategory pages straight from the search engine results. So they'll only read the "dalmation breeders" part.

Let's try "dalmation puppies". It gets 5280 searches per month. It has 24,100 search results. That's way too many. We won't use these keywords.

Let's try "dalmations in germany". This gets 570 searches per month, and there are NO SEARCH RESULTS in Google. That means no competition at all, so that's good. 570 monthly searches is not that many, but we will use these keywords just because there is no competition. It might be hard to write a whole page on dalmations in Germany, but maybe you can find a way to fit that phrase into your page somewhere.

Continue this kind of keyword research until you find a couple of keyword phrases for the subcategory that you think are good and have a good ratio of monthly searches to Google search results. Remember, the way I like to do it is:

-Monthly Google Searches are at least double the number of Google search results.

-There are under 1000 Google search results, preferably under 500.

These are guidelines, and I do violate them sometimes. For example, if a phrase gets 250,000 searches per month it's probably ok if there are 2000 Google search results, because of the massive volume of searches. But basically, I follow the above whenever I can. These are guidelines that I developed intuitively through trial and error, and I didn't learn them from any other source. These are strictly from my own experience.

The above is a keyword researching strategy that you will repeat time and time again with your many subcategories. In this example, you could reapeat the same process for every breed of dog you can think of. Then what the hell, add cartoon dogs, famous dogs from tv or movies, imaginary breeds of dogs, hey why not. As long as you do the keyword research properly you can add and add and add. Some people complain that it makes the site low quality because it is not integrated, that it's just a mishmash of individual pages. Well, that is a problem if you want to build a readership, get people to bookmark your site, or buy something directly through your site. But we are just looking for search engine traffic to as many pages as possible so they can see and click your Google Ads. These don't have to be amazingly professional sites. I follow the rule that if it is offering value to the person who searched for it, then it's valid, even if its connection to the main page of your site is questionable.

When I do keyword research, I use a notepad and simply draw 3 columns, with the keyword on the left, the number of monthly Google searches in the middle, and the number of Google search results on the right. I write down all the keyword phrases I might use, then highlight the best ones that I will definitely use. This works well for me.



Now that we've explored keyword research, it's time to set up a site.