90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us tips on prioritising and finding keywords with Google keyword planner in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Deciding which keywords are most important is a big deal and so for a long time I used to get big lists of keywords from Google Keyword planner and then sort them by search volume and then I might sort them by cost per click. Each of these things is indicative of something useful…
Search volumes: will obviously show you the relative popularity of a given phrase, but it doesn’t explain how commercial a phrase is.
Cost per click for a phrase: this shows a suggested amount you should bid if you were running an adwords campaign and was bidding on that query.
As you may know the real amount you would pay varies massively because of your quality score. But its the data Google gives us for free (i.e. we don’t have to run a campaign to get this bid figure).
The problem I always had was working out what was the most valuable phrase overall. Finally I put 2+2 together and came up with a really simple formula
Cost per Click x search volume = a single number.
Ok so you’re probably thinking so what!?, well one number means I can sort my list from the biggest number to the smallest. And from that I can make more sense of what phrases are most commercially important to me.
Why does this correlate?
Some phrases have higher or lower search volumes which represents interest in the content found around that search term.
Some phrases have higher or lower cost per click which represents the profitability of that phrase for brands advertising there.
If you imagine you have a landing page and you have 10000 searches a month for ‘random keyword’ with a cost per click of £1. 1000 users land on your site and you get a 5% conversion, therefore you have 50 conversions a month from that phrase with an adwords value of £1000 and a cost per acquisition equivalent of £50 a conversion. Nice.
Then imagine you have a landing page that ranks for a phrase with only 1000 searches a month for ‘other random keyword’ with a cost per click of £10. 100 users land on your site and you get a 5% conversion. Therefore you have 5 conversions a month from that phrase with an adwords value of £1000 and a cost per acquisition value of £50 per conversion. You are in the same place as the high volume phrase….
Of course what is best is a combination of real relevance to you, high volumes and high cost per click. Phrases like ‘online casino’ tick all those boxes.
Here is an example list. I used keyword ‘online casino’ on Google adword planner and got all 801 keyword suggestions and ordered them by CPC x Vol (top 20 phrases) :
Interestingly I think this list correlates very well with what are the most valuable keywords in iGaming casino. The only outlier is ‘poker’, but then you would just take it out of the list because it might not be relevant to you. But all in all I find this approach to keyword sorting really useful!
