Keywords: Judging Their Value

Keyword research can reveal the mindset of the consumers who come to your site. This sort of knowledge is invaluable: you can predict shifts in the market, respond to these changes, and supply the new products or content that the users demand. Never before in the history of marketing has there been such a window into the mind of the modern consumers.

How to judge the value of a keyword

Walk in the shoes of your potential consumer by asking yourself some key questions:

  • Is the keyword relevant to the content on your site?
  • Will searchers who use this term find what they are looking for on your site?
  • Will this traffic be beneficial to your organization (either through sales or such)?

Search for the term on the major search engines.

  • Are there ads along the top and side of the search results? If there are ads, that means the keyword has high value.

Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords or Bing Adcenter. in AdWords, choose “exact match” and point the traffic to the most relevant page of your site. Measure the traffic to your site, and track impressions and conversion rate over the course of 300 clicks or so (this could take a few weeks if the site is not trafficked much).

Using all this data you’ve gathered, make an educated guess about the value of a single visitor to your site with the given word or phrase: Say you get 5,000 impressions of your ad and out of those, 100 visitors have come to your site. 3 of these have converted (let’s day they have bought your widget) for a total profit of $300. Doing the math, that would mean that a single visitor is worth $3 or so to your business. Now, imagine you were #1 in the search results for that keyword and could have 1500-2000 visits a day! That is the power of keywords.

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