How to find good keywords for your hubpage

So you have written an article for hubpages and it’s popular and people are reading it and clicking on ads.

Great. One little problem.

Google is not paying you very much. You figure that it will take years to reach the $100 minimum in order to get a check. So what do you do?

You need to optimize your article to ensure that when Google delivers ads to your page at least some of those ads pay more than a token amount. The best way to do that is to let Google tell you what to do.

Google publishes a great tool called "Google AdWords: Keyword tool". This tool is aimed at people who are planning AdWords campaigns but can also be used by people looking to optimize their site for AdSense.

Let us say that you have a hub on headaches. Go to adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal enter your main keyword "headache" in the box, fill out the captcha and press the "Get Keywords Ideas" button. You get a nice little table that shows you keywords related to headaches and how often those keywords are searched for. This is interesting but not very useful. It gets much more interesting when we go to the "Show/Hide columns" pull down and pick "Show All"

See what we get now, Google has added a few columns. By far the most interesting is the "Estimated avg CPC" column. This is what Google estimates is the required bid in order to get the top advertising position. Before you get all existed about your potential riches please note "THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU WILL GET PAID". For detail on how the price is really determined see my article on How does the adwords bidding system work.

Even though these numbers are not “real” we can still make some useful comparisons. We see that the headache keyword has a cost of $2.16. If you look a little further down you can see that "migraine headache" has a cost of 7.80. Much further down the list (and off the screenshot) there is the misspelled "migrain headache" at $16.14.

Clearly migraines are big business compared to plain ordinary headaches. So as you write or rewrite your page it would be a good idea to include some material related to the more profitable migraine instead of just plain headaches. In this particular example, a creative misspelling seems to be in order as well.

Please note that the sample screen shot no longer matches the data that is shown now. The actual process is an auction and the live data changes dramatically as bidders come and go from the auctions. I am using the screen shot data for illustration purposes.

A word of caution, don’t just dump some high paying keywords into your pages in the hope of getting some higher paying ads. You need to have some real content regarding the keywords you are choosing, if the ads are not related to the content, then visitors will not click on them and you will end up worse off than you would have been otherwise.

You also need to keep in mind the search volume that is given. Although the misspelled "migrain headache" has a bid of twice the correctly spelled version the search volume for the misspelled version is 1% of the correct version. Include the misspelling, but do not use it to the exclusion of everything else.