Top Keywords for SEO Software

In a prior post, I cal­cu­lated the best key­words for SEO soft­ware, SEO train­ing, SEO cost, and SEO sub­mis­sion based on the aver­age price of the top ten key­words in var­i­ous sub­ject cat­e­gories that are cov­ered by this blog. Here were the results of my Inter­net SEO research:

* Finance — $34.53
* Busi­ness — $32.65
* Mar­ket­ing — $28.67
* Chris­t­ian — $20.84
* Dat­ing — $16.43
* SEO — $16.12
* TV — $14.50
* India-Rupee — $14.20
* Jewish-Israel — $10.38
* Music — $10.35
* Soc­cer — $8.96
* Eco­nom­ics — $8.53
* Islam — $6.56
* Reli­gion — $5.85
* Cul­ture — $5.84
* Poltics — $1.79

But that was only half of the story. Price is not the same as value in Google SEO research. Here is why. For the first post, I researched the top key­words in the SEO cat­e­gory (among other sub­jects) based only on price. This was the result:
key­word seo services 82 2 $24.82
search engine opti­miza­tion seo companies 52 2 $17.97
afford­able seo company 440 2 $17.08
seo men­tor 42 1 $16.53
afford­able seo report 155 3 $15.02
pro­mo­tion seo services 66 5 $14.76
seo tac­tics 125 2 $14.07
seo capa­bil­i­ties 25 3 $13.86
seo secu­rity 42 0 $13.69
best seo firm 155 7 $13.36

When new blog­gers want to mon­e­tize their web­sites and then see these prices, they usu­ally become ecsta­tic: “You mean I cam make up to $24 per click? Wow!” And they opti­mize their blogs for these key­words.

But they for­get to take some­thing into account: the esti­mated num­ber of monthly searches in Google as listed in the third col­umn from the right. The search vol­ume for the most expen­sive key­words is only eighty-two. This is extremely low. Not only will few peo­ple find the blog in the first place, the low demand for that key­word also shows that few peo­ple will click on the Google ad as a result.

The best prac­tice for SEO blog key­words is to focus on the key­word value, not the key­word price. In eco­nom­ics, the def­i­n­i­tion of “value” is a hazy con­cept, but there is a basic way to cal­cu­late it for SEO pur­poses. For exam­ple, I can mul­ti­ply the search vol­ume by the price to find the total value. Now, here are the top ten SEO key­words based on value, not price:
seo soft­ware 15000 8 3.35 50250
seo train­ing 4400 7 4.83 21252
google seo 5400 3 3.07 16578
seo elite 6600 7 1.93 12738
afford­able seo company 440 2 17.08 7515.2
cheap seo 1000 7 5.89 5890
seo jobs 1800 6 2.82 5076
best seo company 660 5 7.12 4699.2
guar­an­teed seo 820 5 5.43 4452.6
seo rates 660 4 6.01 3966.6

When blog­gers — and web­site own­ers in gen­eral — decide which key­words to tar­get, they need to take at least two fac­tors into account: the search vol­ume (fourth col­umn from the right) and the cost-per-click (CPC) rev­enue (sec­ond col­umn from the right). The “value” num­ber is first on the right — but remem­ber, it is not a mon­e­tary value but rather a num­ber that is use­ful only when com­pared to other key­words and cat­e­gories. (The third col­umn from the right is the com­pe­ti­tion — more on that later.)

The best key­words are those that will bring in a high quan­tity of search traf­fic along with a high level of rev­enue per click. What­ever a blog’s sub­ject cat­e­gory, these are gen­er­ally the key­words that the author should tar­get in SEO.

Now, my research based on price revealed the most-expensive cat­e­gories — listed at the top of the post — in which blog­gers can write. But here are the most-valuable cat­e­gories for blog top­ics based on the men­tioned cal­cu­la­tion using the aver­age of the val­ues of the top ten key­words in each cat­e­gory. You’ll notice a few inter­est­ing changes:
Busi­ness 121,030
Mar­ket­ing 99,908
Finance 70,554
TV 27,356
SEO 13,242
Chris­t­ian 10,469
India-Rupee 9,258
Dat­ing 7,812
Music 6,428
Reli­gion 5,421
Eco­nom­ics 3,202
Jewish-Israel 2,870
Islam 2,737
Soc­cer 2,673
Jour­nal­ism 2,668
Cul­ture 499
Pol­i­tics 435

When blog­gers decide on which topic to write and which top­i­cal key­words to tar­get, they need to focus on value rather than price.

But the story does not stop there. My basic cal­cu­la­tion gives equal weight to both search vol­ume and the price-per-click. Depend­ing on a person’s knowl­edge of online mar­ket­ing, he might want to cal­cu­late the value by weigh­ing one over the other by cer­tain percentages:

* (Search vol­ume x 0.70) + (PPC x 0.30)
* (Search vol­ume x 0.25) + (PPC x 0.75)

Blog­gers may also want to take the level of com­pe­ti­tion into account. Most data gives each key­word a score between zero and ten. Zero means there are few web­sites com­pet­ing for search-engine place­ment for the key­word; ten means, “Good luck!”

If blog­gers want to focus on less-competitive key­words at the begin­ning to rank highly from start, they may mul­ti­ply the prior value by the inverse of the com­pe­ti­tion rating:

* Com­pe­ti­tion of one: value x 1
* Com­pe­ti­tion of five: value x 1/5
* Com­pe­ti­tion of ten: value x 1/10

Or, after cal­cu­lat­ing the value of your list of key­words, online pub­lish­ers may want to sort the data by the com­pet­i­tive rank­ings in a spread­sheet and just delete all key­words with a com­pe­ti­tion value of higher than X. Con­versely, ded­i­cated blog­gers who want to increase the value of their sites in the long term may want to keep highly-competitive key­words if they believe they will be able to match the com­pe­ti­tion in the com­ing months (or longer).

The way to deter­mine the value of a key­word has always been both an art and a sci­ence. To para­phrase one of my favorite movies: online mar­ket­ing is hard — any­one who says oth­er­wise is sell­ing some­thing (that is usu­ally over­rated and expen­sive). The best way to be suc­cess­ful is to test your efforts con­tin­u­ously — in select­ing key­words as well as other areas.