How To Find High Paying Keywords Which You Can Rank For

For those involved in web design or development, high paying keywords which are related to your business are like the holy grail. They are usually the keyords which bring you the best quality traffic. To give yourself a sporting chance of ranking for these keywords you must research the competition before buying a domain or developing a web site.

There are tons of areas in which you can find high paying keywords, however many of these niches are already saturated. A brand new domain name with new content may take months (or longer) to start getting high up the serps for them, if at all. There are also niches in which you will find it easier to rank, some have very low paying keywords, but there are still one or two gems to be found in most niches if you search hard enough.

Here are a few tips and tricks I have picked up along the way for getting the best out of using Googles keyword research tool. It’s a free tool, and if used properly whilst comparing results to a couple of other websites, and a few search engine commands, you can get a good handle on whether the high paying keywords for the site would be worth pursuing.

CPC Column On Keyword Tool

First thing you need to do on visiting the Google keyword research tool is enable the CPC column. Click on the menu in the far right (arrow in image) and enable this column. This will give you an idea from adwords data what people are paying for clicks in adwords for your keywords.

Once you have entered in a keyword you also need to uncheck “broad” search under “match types” in the left menu and select “exact” instead. Far better seeing if the high paying keywords actually get typed rather than just near related searches.

Now you can line up the keyword suggestions from high to low in the CPC column to find high paying keywords which you think are likely what your users will use to find you in Google. Once you spot some you like it’s a good idea to see what the current competition is. I mean really, what is the point in wasting time trying to rank for a high paying keyword if there are less than 100 exact type ins per month and there are hundreds of thousands of websites already optimizing for the term?..

Checking The Competition

You can get a good idea of competition in two ways. Firstly, hop over to Google, type your keyword in “quotes” and see the amount of results which Google has listed. The lower the results and the higher the exact type ins is obviously best. You can also type in allintitle:keyword. This will bring up all sites which are using the keyword within their meta title. For keywords with less than say 500 type ins per month I usually like to see less than about 30 or 40 thousand results using these methods. Larger search numbers, then you can maybe afford to take on anything up to 100,000 or more, depending on the level of SEO and development you intend to do.

Using an idea I picked up a couple of years back from some spammy software (which will remain nameless, but I am sure plenty will guess it!), you can use your eyes on the top 4 or 5 pages of results for the above searches on Google. Look to see if within the first few pages there are any Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger or results served from sites like those. Chances are if an article from a site like those can get into top few pages for an exact search on a high paying keyword, then a well developed site with good structure can rank higher.

You can also look at some of the more professional looking websites on the top pages, ones with decent page rank and low alexa score. Take the URLs of these sites and enter them into the “website” box in the Google keyword research tool. If you see that your keywords are bringing traffic to these sites on the top pages, and there is low competition, then there is a good chance you are onto something.

You can also use SEMRush to see if the high paying keywords are ones bringing traffic to these sites. It’s a subscription service, but you can get a limited amount of data for free. But I think the previously described methods more useful, especially if you are on a limited budget.

So, once you have a list of 4 or 5 high paying keywords, with little competition, and Google is already ranking quite low quality sites for them, you can pursue your new web design project. Whether you are developing a new area to an existing website, or a brand new project it’s really worth while to get an understanding of what you are targeting before you even think about typing one bit of code.

About The Author

My name is Lee and I am an SEO a holic. I love Wordpress, developing online business, and am director/owner of a UK company that operates several high traffic/revenue financial sites. I also consult for SEO with some related sites in my niche.