Google Keyword Tool

donreeco · Mar 13, 2009

I often use the Google keyword tool to help evaluate a potential purchase.

Clearly a high search volume and high CPC are desirable, but I am confused by the relevance of Advertiser competition. I would have thought that high competition would push the CPC up, but some terms have quite high CPC and low competition, while others have high competition but still fairly low CPC!

If you are buying domains with the intention of developing and ranking them, is high Advertiser competition a good or a bad thing?

Cheers

woopwoop · Mar 13, 2009

High advertiser competition is a good thing, but I find that there are so many things that are inaccurate about Googles Keyword Tool - especially The UK version. Maybe it's more accurate for US figures.

The tool has become little help to me recently and acts as a website that'll occasionally give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside when I check certain domains - although the stats are probably not too accurate.

accelerator · Mar 13, 2009

donreeco said:
Clearly a high search volume and high CPC are desirable, but I am confused by the relevance of Advertiser competition. I would have thought that high competition would push the CPC up, but some terms have quite high CPC and low competition, while others have high competition but still fairly low CPC!

If you are buying domains with the intention of developing and ranking them, is high Advertiser competition a good or a bad thing?

Generally speaking high advertiser competition is a good thing, because it means there are lots of advertisers looking to bid on the phrase, so the domain you are buying is along the right lines.

High advertiser competition will not directly correlate with CPC - just because there are a lot of people that want to bid on a phrase doesn't mean that economically it is beneficial to bid a high amount on the phrase, market economics will determine the maximum CPC it is worth an advertiser paying.

Rgds

donreeco · Mar 16, 2009

Cheers for both of your replies!

The point about the CPC having to be economically viable definitely makes sense.

I can see that high advertiser competition is a good thing as a measure of the quality of a domain, i just wondered if the intention was to develop the domain, a combination of high CPC and search volume but low ad competition was best (as it would be easier to rank for the term)

I agree that the google tool does seem inaccurate too - especially in terms of search volume. Does anyone know of any other similar tools that give this sort of info?