In part 1 we used the Wordtracker keyword tool to get more variations for our possible article topic, electric shavers.  We decided on two candidates, electric shaver and electric shavers.

In this part we’ll use the google adwords keyword tool to further research these keywords, possibly find additional ones, and even come up with some future article topics all from this one useful tool.

First off, open up the adwords tool by clicking on the bookmark you saved earlier.  Type in electric shaver, enter the catch phrase and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ button.

• There’s lots of columns and numbers there that may be confusing at first.  Let’s dissect them.
• Keywords:  These are possible keywords that you can use
• Advertiser competition:  This is how much competition an advertiser faces to get their ad to appear on a page.  The more competition, the more the advertiser pays to get placement, and the more you’ll make
• Average search volume: Month:  This is the average search volume last month
• Approx Average search volume:  This is the average search volume per month over the last year.  Seasonal topics will show a big difference between the month average and the year average.

Before we go further we need to add a column, the most important column in my opinion.

Go to that drop down list on the right labeled “Show/Hide Columns” and choose to display “Show Estimated Avg CPC”

Another column appears in the list, this column, Avg CPC is the average amount that keyword pays per click.  This isn’t really an average though, use this column in conjunction to gauge how well it will pay, the more competition the better.

As you can see from the above image the two keywords we were considering, electric shaver and electric shavers aren’t the best paying keywords, they do get good traffic though.

I’m going to stop here for a second.  If you are writing an article for Bukisa, where you get paid on views not ad clicks our two keywords would be a good choice.  Just in case, click once on the average search volume column to see if any other keyword gets good traffic.  Nope, those are the best with about 1/2 million people per month searching for those keywords.

Now for eHow, where we get paid by ad clicks we need to find keywords with a balance between good traffic and high pay.  So click twice on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort by pay.

As you can see our original two keywords moved 1/2 way down the list as there are more profitable keywords above it.

This is the subjective part.  Personally I shoot for the best paying keywords in the XX,000 traffic range, but sometimes I’ll take a lower traffic keyword if the pay is unbelievable.  Oh, check out ‘car insurance’ and sort by CPC and you’ll know what I mean.

In this list two keywords pop out at me.  Electric shaver braun and braun electric shavers.  These are two good ones to use.  I would also take our original two keywords as they can be easily worked into the article.

In this phrase,  braun electric shavers , we have two keywords; braun electric shavers and electric shavers.

Now, here’s an important thing to remember.

Keywords with more than one word are sometimes called ‘long tail keywords’  and when you type them into the keyword area of your article you need to use the correct syntax.

For space separated keyword fields put a dash in between each word in a long tail keyword.  For comma separated just put a space.  So, in eHow we would list our four target keywords as:

braun-electric-shavers electric-shaver-braun electric-shaver electric-shavers

This is important because google now knows you’re targeting that specific phrase, and will show your article if somebody types  “braun electric shavers” into the search engine.

Now some of you may say to yourself, these keywords pay just about the same, why the bother.  Well, two reasons, by choosing a keyword to show with little variation is payout and syntax I can show you how we can combine two keywords in our title, like this…

How to Get a Great Price on a Braun Electric Shaver

See, two keywords: braun-electric-shaver and electric-shaver.  Do this as often as you can for success on getting traffic and money!

When google looks for keywords it gives more weight to keywords in the title and in the first paragraph of the article, my title above has two keywords which i’ll specify in the keyword section.

The second reason for showing this keyword is we now need to look at our competition to see what we’re up against to get page ranking.

The next part will show how to research our competition to make a final decision on our keywords for our article.

Possibly Related Posts:

• A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention
• Google Search as a Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 3