Doing Keyword Research For AdSense Niches

Keyword research is the most important element in niche site design. Whether you’re doing search engine marketing or Pay-Per-Click advertising, both systems rely on keywords. Both systems are powered by search engines.

Does “Creating A Website For The Visitor” Always Apply?

Even though it is very good advice to create a website for your visitors, there still has to be a way to find your site. The other day, my wife told me about a companies website. I tried to search for it in Google and I couldn’t find it. The site was made over 3 years ago! I had to ask her for the web address.

It was an amazing site. The company spent over $5000 for a 5 page site with some database functionality. So why was it hidden in Google? Four out of five pages were composed of images. There were no ALT tags. The page titles only had the company’s name with no relative niche keywords.

So now that I’ve explained the importance of keyword research, here’s a story about my ‘personal’ keyword research breakthrough.

Keyword Research Strategies Specifically For AdSense

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing keyword research for a few AdSense niches. After listening to James Martell’s Affiliate Buzz last year, I started to put some AdSense code on some sites. However, these ads were just no-brain methods to get extra money…ways to supplement affiliate income.

Reversing The Roles In AdSense Keyword Research

After reading Joel Comm’s AdSense Code book, I started to think more about targeting AdSense. So instead of thinking about affiliate income as primary, and AdSense as secondary, I’ve reversed the roles of these two monetization strategies (on some sites). In doing so, I realized that I had to add another element to my keyword research…the top Google AdWords bid price.

The Bid Price Is The Key

I never really paid attention to it before, but with AdSense, bid price research is the key element in making more money. So doing AdSense keyword research has been somewhat of a paradigm shift for me. When you have high bid’s on Google AdWords, that also means that theirs a lot of competition in a niche.

Traditionally, I would stick low competition, high demand niches. Although those niches are still great, especially for affiliate niche sites, they don’t do as well as my AdSense keyword targeted sites. So with AdSense, I’m using related high bid price keywords as my product pages.

AdSense Keyword Research Tools

With the use of Keyword Elite, I’m able to retrieve hundreds, and even thousands of keywords with top paying bids. Since the data from Google, the program does have some limitations though. I can’t get all of the bid prices at once. With Google’s data speed limit, I could only retrieve data for a few hundred words in 1 shot. So once I notice Keyword Elite not collecting that many bid prices, I continue the process the following day.

Keyword Elite does have some options to tweak the speed of data retrieval, but I haven’t found any details on this yet. KE calls it “SE Courtesy” and the “Speed Limiter”. Since Keyword Elite is relatively new, there’s only a few threads about the bid price limitation in the support forum. Hopefully Brad Callen will come up with an update soon.

In addition to Keyword Elite, Dr. Andy’s Keyword Results Analyzer has always been useful.