Keyword Competition and Making Money from AdSense

I've been playing around with Market Samurai a lot recently, trying to get my head around the effect that Google's policy to not reporting keywords used by logged in users is having on my ability to turn a profit using AdSense.

(If you missed out on what actually happened, check my blog post on The Death of Keyword Research.)

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that Google themselves know what keywords are being used. After all, their AdWords, and AdSense programs both rely, to a certain extent, on that knowledge.

Google is also passing that information along, not via Analytics, but via products like Market Samurai, which aggregates a lot of data from search providers, and AdSense to enable us to find profitable niches. Not to hundreds of keywords to go with them, content to promote them, and something called the Competition index.

Now, a simple competition index might be the number of search results returned by Google for a keyword phrase. This is fair, and workable, but a bit artificial. After all, 90% of those search results might be complete rubbish!

Market Samurai goes one step further, and provides another layer of competition information based on the top domains and their comparative reliability, influence, and authority.

This is all good, but is competition really important when making money from AdSense?

The answer may well be no. Or possibly just maybe.

A lot of content creators make money from sites that have installed AdSense, and pass those earnings along. Suite101, for example, and Squidoo, HubPages, and many blogs with authoritative top level domains.

So, just because there are a lot of entries in a search engine result database for a keyword phrase, the weighting of the individual domains may well mean that the competition index can be ignored. 

Comparing a new domain with a single article on it with an established and regularly indexed site like Suite101 isn't comparing like with like. Google sees these two things very differently - and will probably give more weight (higher ranking) to Suite101 articles.

Added to which, there are other traffic acquisition strategies that can bring traffic. Analytics reports that for some of my most popular articles, the majority of the traffic is by referral and social media.

The kicker is that the social media traffic has more traction, with visitors spending more time on the site, and with much lower bounce rates. My guess would also be that, were AdSense to be installed, they'd bring the biggest profits!

(Disclaimer : I am an affiliate for Market Samurai, as well as being a user. By clicking on any of the links, I will potentially earn an affiliate payment. If you do not wish this to be the case, please use this link.)

Traffic Research With Google Analytics

Many online publishing platforms have either switched their statistics packages to Google Analytics, or have introduced ways for users to link their Analytics accounts to the publishing platform.


Suite101, for example, no longer retains any statistics or tracking (including keywords) on-site, having moved everyone to their own Analytics accounts some months ago. Squidoo, another large online publishing platform, have followed a similar path, but retain some basic on-site reporting.


Google Analytics itself has evolved (as has the Google AdSense Keyword Research Tool, another firm favorite) and in doing so has become more modern, more minimalist, and considerably more useful.


Google Analytics Reporting Tool


Anyone with a Google account can have access to Analytics. Anyone with a blog, Squidoo Lenses, a web page, or other online publishing platform needs to use Analytics to have any chance of leveraging their online presence.


It's misunderstood, however, by people who look only at the organic keywords as a way to gauge where they should be concentrating their publishing efforts.


Simply targeting the most searched-for keyword phrase that has delivered visitors is slightly missing the point. Yes, it's important, but so is tracking and measuring other statistics.


Using Google Analytics Organic Search Results


The aforementioned report can be found in the menu on the left hand side, under Search->Organic Search. It produces a list of the most frequently used keywords that have delivered visitors to the site, along with the number, and two other vital bits of data:

• the time spent on the site;
• the number of pages viewed (per visitor).

So, why are these important?

Firstly, the time spent is important for sites like Squidoo and Suite101, where advertising provides an important source of revenue.

The number of pages viewed is especially important for Suite101, as it shows which pages (articles) are keeping interest up, and, more importantly why.

Making the most of these two statistics requires that the whole list be exported to CSV, or a similar format, and then some clever sorting applied in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

There are a number of interesting formulae that can be used to weight these, but each reader is likely to want something different from the results, and so they should use their own experience to help filter out the best keyword phrases to target.

A final note - use the keywords to guide content, but don't write around them. Otherwise, you'll only ever have the same list coming back, and it's far better to introduce variety and try to capture fresh traffic.