How important are keywords? If you are a search engine marketer, they are the ONLY way to get traffic and make money.

You can make money without doing keyword research. Examples would be joint ventures, co-registration, and advertising on other people’s sites.

But for the vast majority of online marketers, the keywords chosen will determine how much money they make.

Making the Right Choice

So how do you choose the right keywords?

You need to focus on the “buying keywords.” I can’t emphasize this point enough. This means keywords that the person searching has the potential to be sold on.

An example of a buying keyword would be “how to jump higher.” This means the person searching is looking for information on how to increase their vertical leap. So you can sell them a course on how to achieve this.

However, if they were to just type in the keyword “jump” or even “vertical leap” you have no idea what they are searching for.

They might be looking for the song by Van Halen… or with the second keyword simply trying to find out who holds the world record for the highest vertical leap.

Do a search on these keywords and you will see that there are very few advertisers and the ones that are there are bidding an extremely low price.

How Do You Know?

How do you tell if it’s a “buying keyword” or not?

It’s simple. Just look at how many people are advertising with Google Adwords —the ads on the right of the page of your search results. The more the better.

If there’s nobody advertising, you know the keyword probably doesn’t make money and it’s not going to be worth going after. Also take note of what kind of products they are selling. This will give you an idea of what you will need to sell to compete.

From there all you have to do is sell a similar product and do it a little better than everyone else. Don’t completely reinvent the wheel. If everyone is selling an information product don’t try and sell a physical product.

Just make a guarantee with your information product that nobody else is and you will have a leg up on your competition.

Important

This is important even if you are doing SEO. Many people waste months and even years getting ranked for a keyword with no advertisers and no profit potential.
If they had done proper keyword research they could have saved themselves a lot of time and energy and instead gone after the money keywords.

The money is in the “long tail.”

It gets said a lot but it’s worth repeating. Generally speaking, the most profitable keywords are at least three word keyword phrases and often more. One to two keyword phrases are generally too generic to sell to people.

To wrap up. Make sure the keywords you are targeting have money making potential. This will help you stay focused in your online marketing efforts and avoid wasting time on useless keywords.