Hubpages Keyword Research Strategy for Google Adsense Revenue

My keyword research strategy to get more Google Adsense revenue started out more as a hit and hope one. My intention has always been to write on what I am interested in (because I think it is reasonable to believe that many other people will be interested in those subjects too) and to promote my hubs here on HubPages by creating links and backlinks to my hubs for better search engine ranking. My strategy has developed through learning from other Hubbers and reading more widely.

The reason for developing such a strategy is not only to increase the number of visitors who have found my hubs by entering a search phrase into one of the search engines, but also, to maximise the Google Adsense revenue from the Hubs on subjects I love, rather than writing about something just because (according to Google), the keywords for that topic pay a lot. I joined HubPages at the beginning of April and so, at the time of writing, I have been a member for a little over three months.

This is the first of two hubs on my strategy for getting more traffic to my Hubs and for earning more from them. This Hub deals with my keyword strategy, the second will deal with my strategy for promoting my Hubs by creating links and backlinks.

First of all, I learned a little about keywords and keyword discovery - searching to find what might be good keywords to use in my articles. I decided early on, that I couldn’t write hubs about things that did not interest me, just to get higher paying keywords, my purpose for joining Hubpages was not just to make money but also to research, learn and enjoy writing – and of course, to meet some really lovely Hubbers along the way! Making best use of keywords is known as keyword optimization.  So, I am developing my keyword management strategy for getting the best keywords in each article. Many of my earlier hubs fail pretty dismally in that not only have they got low paying keywords, but they are low paying keywords that do not get much search traffic and I will be going back to try and improve these, using the strategy outlined below.

Update 12th October 2010

Google have now removed the previous interface mentioned below and I will be rewriting this section of this hub. However, you should still be able to use the information with the new keyword tool.

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I use Google Keyword Finder tool for my keyword discovery research as it is a free keyword search tool. I always go to the ‘previous interface’ (look up in the right hand corner of the screen for the link to this). I type in my keyword, and fill in the captcha. Then I click get keyword ideas. Once the screen comes up with the keyword selection, I go to the box that is set as ‘broad’ by default and change it to ‘exact’ – if you try this, you will be amazed to see the keyword that you thought was brilliant, suddenly has dramatically fewer searches! You will see that the top part of the keyword ideas is for keywords that actually include the keyword you have chosen and the lower part of the screen is for keywords that are additional keywords to be considered as they are related to the keyword you have chosen.

Next, I go to the show hide columns, and select hide advertiser competition, show average cpc. Cpc is the cost per click and is the factor that determines how good any particular keyword pays us as publishers when someone clicks on an advert on one of our Hubs. When an advertiser chooses an adword keyword, the cpc of the keyword is determined by how much any advertiser is willing to pay for a click on his adword keyword. The higher the figure the better – though the cpc shown is not the figure you will get, far from it, as this is the price the advertiser is paying google – you will be lucky to get half that! In our early days on Hubpages when we are only getting a few clicks a day, it is better to have a couple of clicks that each pay $1, than a couple of clicks that each pay a cent!

I leave in the local and global searches for the moment because I live in UK and there are often big differences between google uk and google.com. This is really only relevant if you have a .co.uk site that you are writing for. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the difference. Now we are getting somewhere. You can see that you can sort any of the columns by clicking on the title (once for lowest to highest, click again for highest to lowest). What I do first, is sort the keywords and related keywords into alphabetical order and look for highest paying keywords, especially long tail keywords (which I term to be three words or more. For example, ‘aromatherapy essential oils’ or ‘organic aromatherapy essential oils’ and I try to find ones with a good number of searches and this, for me, is over 500 in a month.

You do not have to lower the integrity of your article, go off-topic, or include irrelevant keywords to benefit from these higher paying keywords on the topic or ‘niche’ as it is known in SEO speak. For instance, if you found that Rhubarb and Custard Dessert had a cpc of $1.50 and monthy searches of 4,000, whereas the plural term Rhubarb and Custard Desserts had a cpc of $1.20 and only 1,500 monthly searches, it would be sensible to change the structure of your sentences slightly to enable you to talk about it in the singular!

Remember though, that the higher paying keywords on a hugely popular topic (such as Credit Cards) are likely to be a much more dificult search engine keyword to rank for. However, on Hubpages, we have the advantage that if we can write a well ranked Hub, we are already on the HubPages platform which is a lot different to starting from scratch with an unranked, brand new website on a topic. Even so you are probably really looking for a search engine keyword that is a longer tail keyword in these very popular niches as although these have fewer searches, there is less competition and you have a better chance of picking up some of the traffic.

I have not found a way to analyse competition from other websites using the Google Keyword Finder - I initially confused this with the Advertiser Competition and then realised that this was not the same thing at all! There are Keyword SoftwareTools you can purchase, such as Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder that will help you to analyse this competition as well, but at present, as my budget is very low, I have not gone down this route.

If you have chosen a seasonal keyword like ‘Christmas Crackers’ you might want to look at the graph for the variation month by month of searches and time publication of your hub accordingly. Although there is probably a lot to be said for publishing a hub and allowing it to ‘mature’ so that you are right up there in the rankings when people start looking for ‘Christmas Crackers’!

Unfortunately, the Google Keyword Finder tool cannot tell us how easy or difficult any particular keyword is to rank for – in other words, it cannot tell us how strong the competition is. This would be very important if we were setting up a website and in this case, it would be advisable to use one of the paid search tools but, as we are writing on HubPages that gets very good rankings for good hubs, this is not quite so crucial.

Before you start writing your hub though, type in the main keyword phrase you want to use for your hub as a hubpages search. This will tell you how many other hubbers you are up against on that particular topic. Depending on the quality of these hubs, you may still want to go ahead, if you are confident you can beat them in the google rankings with your backlinking efforts.

You can download the keywords as a CSV file and try to include the best paying, higher search volume ones in your Hub and then use them as tags. It is important though to ensure the following:-

1. Include your main keyword in your title and as near to the beginning of your title as possible. For example, if I had chosen ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ as my high paying, high search volume keyword, (I’m sure it isn’t though!), a title ‘Rhubarb and Custard, My Favourite Dessert’ would be better than ‘My Favourite Dessert, Rhubarb and Custard’. This is because the Google Search Engine gives more weight to the first few words in the title when establishing what the article is about. Also bear in mind that Google only displays 60 characters when it shows a page title so you need to get the vital information in.

2. Make sure you include your keyword again in the opening sentence of your Hub, but do not repeat the title.

3. Use your keyword a few times throughout your article but, do not be guilty of ‘keyword stuffing’, overuse of your keyword which just sounds (and reads) ‘spammy’.

To carry on with the ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ analogy, if you have another Hub on recipes, or desserts or favourite foods or a related subject, you can create a link back to your hub about Rhubarb and Custard from there. HubPages give you a ‘quick link to your hubs’ dropdown menu when you insert a link and if you use your Rhubarb and Custard long tail keyword as your text for the link, rather than the full title of your Hub, you have created a contextual anchor text link. I have come around to thinking, after reading about links, that using specific keywords as anchor text is better from the ranking point of view than using the whole title.

Google Analytics has become more useful to me as a keyword management tool as I have learned a little better how to use it. What I am looking for now is firstly an increase in ‘Organic’ traffic, i.e. traffic that has come from Search Engines, the largest of these being Google. Secondly, I am looking to see where my ‘Referred’ traffic is coming from. The Referred traffic will be covered in my second Hub on Promoting HubPages Hubs so I am not going to go into that here.

Organic traffic comes when people searching on the Internet, manage to find one of your Hubs when they have entered a search term. By using Google Analytics, you can analyse this further. You can find out which search engines are driving traffic to your HubPages and which keywords phrases are the ones which have resulted in most visitors. This will help you with keyword optimization. You can also see whether someone searching for ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ for example, a) found your hub and b) stayed long enough to read it (and hopefully to find a Google Adsense advert and click on it!).

If you find that people are finding a Hub by searching on a particular term, but not staying long, ask yourself why and try to improve the content so that it provides more relevant information for that term. At the time of writing, about 75% of my traffic is coming from search engines and 13% from referred traffic as a result of my efforts in promoting my Hubs so it is evident how critical Keywords are to the success of our Hubs.

At I mentioned, I have not purchased any keyword software as yet - although I have utilised the free trial of some of the Keyword Analysis software on the market, I haven't yet decided to take the plunge and spend any money. If I go down this route, I will update this Hub but for the moment, I will be sticking to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Thanks for reading and please let me know your comments and thoughts on my ‘strategy’.

Since writing this Hub, I have been making use of a keyword research tool called Market Samurai - I got a free trial through joining this year's Challenge 2010 (previously called the 30 day challenge) program which is free - and interesting!

Market Samurai update 6th October 2010. Now that I have learned how to use Market Samurai, I have gone ahead and bought the software which cost me $97. I consider this to be fantastic value for money as there are no monthly fees and I will get free updates to the program 'forever'. I found the video tutorials and all the information in the Challenge 2010 made Market Samurai easy to use and now that I have got better at finding keywords with it and learned some neat tricks along the way, I will be publishing a hub about this in the near future. I hope you will decide to try Market Samurai for yourself. It is free to try and if you join through my link, I will get a commission as it is an affiliate link. If you prefer not to do that, just 'Google' Market Samurai and you will find all the information you need.

I have also discovered the free Niche Finder tool on Wordstream which also has helped me as by analysing each of the keyword phrases turned up by this tool on the Google Keyword Research Tool, then downloading them all as csv files, amalgamating them into one spreadsheet and using the de-duplicate tool on Excel, I have ended up with a string of keywords that I have been able to analyse in Market Samurai for the likelihood of success!

PS - since I have discovered the full potential of Market Samurai, I no longer need to use the Niche Finder tool - Market Samurai is all I need!

 If you are reading this Hub and have not yet joined HubPages, what are you waiting for!!  To find out more about becoming a HubPages author and how you can earn from your writing here on HubPages, visit the Join HubPages page.