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Keyword Research. Where It All Begins Part 2 of 2

Wednesday, November 4th 2009, by Adam Barger

How to determine the value of a keyword.

There are four numbers you need to know in order to determine an accurate keyword value. You'll need to know the number of people searching for a keyword or phrase, the percentage of people who will click on your search result when it's displayed, the percentage of the people who visit your website who will actually buy something from you, and the amount of money the average person pays for your product or service.

At this point you're probably wondering where and how do you come up with all of these numbers to plug into the formula. In the spirit of simplifying things start with the numbers you already know. Most people already know how much money they charge for their products and services. So that's typically a good place to start.

Finding the rest of the numbers to determine a keyword value will require some research. Fortunately there are some tools that can help. Google has a nifty keyword tool that can tell your roughly how many times a keyword or phrase has been searched for in a given month. Using the data derived from that tool you can make an educated guess to determine if a keyword is searched for frequently enough to pursue. You can use the number provided from the Google Keyword Tool as the number of searches portion of your keyword value formula.

You can find the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Click through rates are a little bit more tricky to determine. I usually determine them using data from my Google Adwords account. When you advertise with Google Adwords you're provided access to click through rate data for your ads. That data is usually a good indication of what you can expect with both standard organic search results as well as ads which are displayed amongst search results like Adwords. In my experience you can expect click through rates to hover between 1-3%. One factor that influences your click through rate is the ranking of your search results. Higher ranked results typically generate higher click through rates.

The last number you'll need to determine the keyword value is your conversion rate. There are a few ways you can track your conversion rate. If you have a small business and you're not dealing with many customers the easiest way is just to ask each customer where they found your business and log it in a spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper. If you're getting a ton of website visitors and you're selling your products and services online it will be much easier to use some website tracking. If you have a paid WebStarts account then you already have a great web statistics program build right into your site.

Using the data gathered from your website tracking software you'll be able to plug-in the last number in your keyword value formula. That number is your conversion rate or percent of people who visited your website and made a purchase.

Now that you have determined your keyword value you'll want to use the Google Keyword Tool to find as many valuable keywords as possible. The Google Keyword Tool can make suggestions. Just type in keywords and phrases you think people might use to find your product or services and the Google Keyword Tool will provide you with some suggestions.

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