Key Words and SEO: How to use Google Key Word and Traffic Estimator Tools?

Key words search is one of the major tasks today for SEO activities in any on-line platform. Many of us do undertake a lot of efforts in making suitable key word research. In the current hub, I have tried to present some commonly practiced methods of finding key words by online writers.

On the WWW, there are numerous keyword research tools both free and paid. However, the most popular key word research tool is probably the Adword tool from Google. While by now, the use of Adwords is no secret, I am writing this hub in the interest of all those who find it difficult to use this tool for Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it is popularly known. Let me also clear it in the beginning itself that I do not claim to be an expert in SEO. I am sure, hubpages is packed with experts from many fields and there are quite a lot of people who have developed and practice better SEO techniques. However, due to my engagement as a SEO manager for a site Lokkatha (http://lokkatha.com), I have gone through some preliminary formal and informal training in the activity of searching key words and SEO. I shall share my views on the subject as I know it. I shall be delighted to have comments, observations and corrections in my approach from the fellow hubbers.

Coming straight to the point of SEO, let us talk about why we are interested in this. It is beyond any doubt that most of us while writing have a motive of earning money in the back of their minds. Of course, there are hubbers (as I notice) who write only for the sake of pleasure they get from writing, although some of them are also earning good money out of their interest. So when earning money is the motive, most of the hubbers seek to write in such a manner that their hubs may trigger some adsense ads that pay well. This also means that we often do some compromise with our original feelings, ideas and natural flow of writing in order to create a 'good paying hub', which is not necessarily a 'good read hub'. Many say that quality of the written contents matter a lot, but it is often true that a very well written hubs may turn up as poor paying hubs. No, I am not trying to downplay the importance of quality. Quality is very important. But my motive here is to focus only on pay once a minimum standard is maintained as far as quality is concerned.

When earning from a hub becomes the priority for the hubber, the reality is a hub's paying capacity is directly proportional to its popularity or the number of views it attracts. In the hubpages, hubs' popularity among the fellow hubbers is important for increased number of page-views. But even if one has hundreds of followers, a hub may not generate its potential income if viewed only by the fellow hubbers. In order to earn its potential revenue, a hub should be able to attract readers from the outside world, or what we know as generic traffic. For example, if someone searches for something on a search engine like google, a hub that appears on the first page is more likely to generate more page views and subsequently earn more revenue. If we can arrange the tags or key words in such a manner that a search for something may trigger the key words to promote the hub on the first few results in the search. This is here, the role of SEO comes. SEO activities related to key words involve the following.

1. Identifying what people are searching on a specified topic or area of knowledge.

2. List the key words as per their efficiency, judged either in terms of earning potential or in terms of page view generations.

3. Write your hub incorporating all or some of these key words identified so that whenever someone searches for the key words, she may find the hub on the results page. This increases the page view of the hub and subsequently the earnings.

How to undertake Keyword Research through Google Adwords?

A few weeks back, I published a recipe hub titled Indian Recipes: How to make Oriya Style Jack Fruit Kebab . I shall show in detail the process of research I undertook for this hub through Adwords tool for finding suitable key words.

STEP-1 Using Adwords Tool for finding Keywords that trigger Adsense Impressions

In any research the foremost task is to identify a topic. In this case, I knew exactly what I was going to write on. It was a cooked recipe with jack fruit as my key word. I used Adword tools to find what exact words or phrases are searched by people in general who seek to search on jack-fruits. As seen in the picture, in the Adwords tool, I wrote “Jack Fruit Recipes”. I also set the location parameter as “All Countries” and language parameter as “English”. When I clicked the search button, I found a list of 72 key words/ phrases that indicate the type of things people type on the search field in google. While most of the key words found in this way had high page impressions for google Adsense for most of the terms it may be worthless if these keywords that are triggering Adsense ads, are not generating sufficient traffic. In order to assess so, I tried to estimate traffic for these 72 key word

STEP-2: Using Traffic Estimator Tool to estimate hub traffic

If you have a google account you can log in to that account and use the traffic estimator tool available under Adwords service. As indicated in the figure, I inserted all the identified 72 key words into the input field of the traffic estimator field. Then I set a daily budget of around 60 dollars. Then when I searched for traffic, I found that only 14 key words out of 72 selected earlier were able to generate more than 1 impressions. Only nine had more than 10 impressions. Out of curiosity, I tried to calculate the possible cost to advertisers on these key words by multiplying the CPC (cost per click) with the potential clicks. This left us with only five key words with an average income of more than half dollar per day under the position conditions. This means, in case of the first key word “Food Recipes”, if our hub with the key word “Food Recipes” is able to attain a position of 1.2 in google search result, we may be able to generate Rs 3304 or approximately 70 Dollars per day. Thus, the task now is to incorporate the key word in the hub on Jackfruits and then try to popularise the article so that it attains a search result position of 1.2. However, one must remember that the hubbers like us would get only a fraction of the amount after discounting for the share of google as well as hubpages.

STEP-3: Incorporating Selected Key words in the hub written

Now that we know, which key words are paying, we can easily incorporate these keywords in our articles or hubs and try to make those articles popular in the search results. This will not only generate more income from adsense, but also in a predictable manner.

I hope, this hub is useful for the fellow hubbers. Please post your views in comments.