I am going to pick up the thread from Part 1 in this series about the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. At the end of the previous article we had typed in our keyword phrase, successful online business, and now we need to dig into the results. The first thing that I want to do is to adjust the tool to get more helpful results.

There is a drop down option about half way down on the right side of the page that says Match Type. Go ahead and change that to Exact. This will give you a more accurate number of the actual monthly searches for your keyword phrase. You can see that the exact match reduced our number down to 720.

Now what we need to do is change some options so that we can tell what we are looking at. Go the Choose columns to display drop down and do the following:

Show Estimated Avg. CPC
Hide Advertiser Competition
Hide Local Search Volume

What you should end up with is the following information:

This tells us that our keyword phrase is searched for 720 times a month globally. Currently, people are bidding 2.69 to advertise for that phrase. If you were using keywords to develop an income from Google, this information would be what you would need to know to see if it would be worthwhile to develop a site or a page that would respond to the search engines for the keyword. In this case, if I was able to get ranked in the top spot for this keyword. I would get some portion of the 720 monthly searches. Probably around 300 visitors a month. A normal percentage of people who actually click on ad is about 2.5 %. So I would get about 7 or 8 clicks. I wouldn’t get all of the $2.69 each time either. Google takes a cut. I would probably get about .75 (seventy-five cents) per click. Every month I would make about five or six dollars. That makes this a terrible keyword for Adsense. However, since I am only developing the phrase as an experiment I will continue to use it and see what I can do.

The next thing I need to do is see what the competition looks like. Go to the Google Search bar and type in the keyword phrase there.

The results of our search look like this:

Now I check the toolbar page rank for each of the sites in the top five positions. If any of them are a 4 or greater, I usually find a different keyword. It will take to much work and time to crack the top five. In this case, everything in the top 5 has a toolbar page rank of 2 or less. I will continue on with this keyword so that you can see the process from here.

Until next time….

Steve