Whats a good keyword monthly search

stender · Jan 13, 2016

What do you deem is a good monthly search rate for a keyword that you think is worth building a site for? and the competition Low or med?

I'm a bit out of touch and forgotten most of what I knew. I have an area i'm thinking of setting up a blog for the wife to manage but not sure if it is worth the effort. Google keyword tool is a little confusing as well!

ian · Jan 13, 2016

Difficult to answer because every sector and every product is different, and levels of interest don't necessary convert to visitors on a site in the same sense. If it was product specific, a few thousands maybe. If it was more generalised, with more competition, then significantly more.

Experts in targeted advertising on here might be able to give you a clearer view.

martin-s · Jan 13, 2016

Assume that you have to get to #1 to get roughly 35-40% of the total search traffic.

Then consider what your conversion rate is likely to be. Are you making enough sales to keep it interesting?

Then consider your average profit margin per sale. Are you making enough profit to keep it interesting?

What if you only get to 10th spot and have around 2% of the search traffic? Can you afford the investment needed to get to #1?

mat · Jan 13, 2016

I tend to look at the bigger picture these days and see how many people are also searching based around the main keyword. That way you can scoop up all the long tail searches as you go, with the end goal to hopefully rank for the main one in the future.

stender · Jan 13, 2016

ok here's where i get cryptic trying to get help without giving too much away....so for example I search for alcoholism. keyword tool search has 2 tabs "keyword ideas" and "ad group ideas"
Keyword ideas shows 90k monthly search for alcoholism and med competition.
Other tab shows 32k for alcoholic, Alcoholics anonymous... etc and Low competition.
Then I also see a similar name for it showing 74k on keyword ideas and Low competition.

Are these good? would you create a blog/site on the back of this?
If I search google for these keywords though page 1 is major sites like wikipedia and organisations, charities etc...

I'm basically looking to set something up for the wife to do. There will be no costs as I'll stick a WP site together. She will write few articles a day and eventually look to add some affiliate or products.
suggested bid columns show between 90p and £1.30

scottmccloud · Jan 13, 2016

Factor in longtail keywords. You'll find that sometimes you can drive a ton of traffic pretty easily in the right niche using these rather than slaving away fighting a battle you'll probably never win to get top spot for the main keyword.

martin-s · Jan 13, 2016

Information sites obviously have different needs to product sales sites.

If you're only going to make income off adsense or something, then your EPV might be £0.05 or less.

Other than that, the same comments apply.

PS. The competition mentioned on the adwords keyword tool is a good indicator of how commercial the intent of the traffic is. Low competition generally indicates non-buying phrases (otherwise people would be bidding on the phrase for clicks) - in established markets at least.

stender · Jan 14, 2016

martin-s said:
PS. The competition mentioned on the adwords keyword tool is a good indicator of how commercial the intent of the traffic is. Low competition generally indicates non-buying phrases (otherwise people would be bidding on the phrase for clicks) - in established markets at least.

How do you mean? The keyword states Low competition but it's also saying suggested bid of £1.30 for the keyword.
Doesn't that suggest competition is low _ good.
and people will be charge circa £1 for ads so I would get percentage of that? I dont recall what percentage adsense pays.

Admin · Jan 14, 2016

You've got some really good advice there from mat, ian, scott et al. Worth reading again and making sure you've taken it on board. Those search volumes you quoted are IMO very high and so you get a big yes its worth it from me. However, if you cant rank p1 because of household names taking those spots its a bit academic so the long tail route is probably what you should be looking at. On-site SEO can go a long way to getting this achieved, page name/urls, title tags all that easy stuff.