Anatomy of Good Keywords: Top 4 Important Metrics that you Cannot Ignore

After knowing how to do a proper keyword research, the next step will be how to pick good keywords out from the keyword suggestions list. In this post, I will tell you about 4 important metrics that you always need to remember when picking keywords.

A common misconception about keywords is that most of your traffic will only come from the keywords you have chosen. This isn’t true. You will notice a lot of times in your traffic stats, traffic comes from variant of the keyword you are targeting. For instance, when I wrote a post about “Google Sandbox“, I really focus on keywords “google sandbox” and “how long does sandbox take”. However, it’s interesting to see that sometimes, my blog receive traffic from keyword “google sandboxed” as well. This is what SEO experts often call the long tail effect.

While it’s nice to see the long tail traffic to your blog, bear in mind that you still have to center your content and your backlinks around several keywords. In addition, also remember that the keywords you choose today will not be all and end-all of how you expect your visitors will visit your site.

Good keywords in general

Basically, best keywords range from 2 to 4 words long. They describe exactly what daily language people use to search for your blog. Not something too special or too simple, just imagine that you are a normal user and think about in what keywords you should describe your home page or your inner pages correctly.

That’s the first requirement of good keywords; length. In addition, good keywords must also have enough traffic; means they must be popular. You can’t pick keywords that none or few people are searching for because it will hurt your website much.

You can’t pick keywords that are too popular as well. Normally, 1 or 2 phrases keywords are frequently popular keywords and it’s very hard to get into top of Google. Even if you get into top of Google, that keywords may not convert well because searchers are looking for something in specific and they will leave your page after they haven’t found what they are looking for.

Good keywords must also have good Return On Investment (ROI) indication. This’s particular useful if you are doing a keyword research for your niche site and what you are trying to achieve is attract traffic to your niche site to promote some products. In this particular scenario, you may want to look at Adwords CPC, which tells how much value in terms of money keywords can bring to you.

Finally, you can’t ignore the phrase-to-broad ratio, which is introduced only in Market Samurai (I think so. I have used a lot of keyword researching tools myself but almost none of them offer this feature like Market Samurai). High phrase-to-broad ratio number simply means how difference it is between a phrase-match search and a broad-match search, which I will explain more clearly in the section below.

Traffic aspect of good keywords

Good keywords aren’t composed by just only 1 word. Nor they are composed by 5 or 6 words long. The reasonable number of words are in the range of 2 to 4 words. You can exceed 1 or 2 words if it’s really necessary.

Single-word terms are not ideal for optimizing. It’s because they are too broad and have too much competition. Think about it: When is the last time you use only 1 word for your search? None of them, right? When you type only 1 word into the search engine, the results are too broad that you have to refine your searches by putting some more keywords in search box. Imagine if we do that for searching something on the Web, how can we optimize our website just around single-word terms?

Avoid keywords that are too broad, or too specific, unpopular and have high competition as well. The rule of thumb is always put yourself into the position of searchers and feel whether or not you’re comfortable searching for your web pages using that keywords, you will know the answer right away.

In Market Samurai, if you create a new keyword and then generate the keyword suggestions for that keyword. After that, click on the Analyze Results. Then, click on the check box Total searches, you can see how many searches are done a day for a keyword and you can imagine how many clicks to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd result. According to the heat map on Google Result page, top position receives as much as 80% of the searches, 2nd position receives 60% and 3rd position receives 50%. You can based on that to calculate potential number of clicks you may get.

There’s no real magic formula for the number of Total searches. I think if you are good on SEO, aim for keywords that have at least 100 searches per day so you can get 3000 searches per month. I think 100 will be an ideal number for Total searches per day. However, if you have a list of keyword suggestions in which all of them have low Total Searches, all of them < 100 and you think it may grow in the future, don’t hesitate to optimize for them. The ultimate rule here is to find keywords with best Total searches per day so you can match your content to.

ROI of good keywords

The second aspect of good keywords is ROI indication. ROI simply means money you pay today into optimizing keywords will be more likely to grow in some next months or so if you get your page on the top of Google for your keywords and people start buying products that you are promoting.

In Market Samurai, in the Analyze Keywords panel, click on the Adwords CPC column. If it doesn’t appear, hit the Refresh button. You will see now a column to the right of the suggestion table. This column will show you how much people are bidding for that keyword. The more money people are bidding in, the more value in terms of money that keyword can bring to you.

After having the Adwords CPC, you can calculate potential value of keywords using the formula:

Potential money achieved = Adwords CPC x Total Searches per month x 0.2 x 0.05 x 0.5 (Credit to OnlineProfits program)

Phrase-to-broad indicator

Phrase search means that you put your search terms into a quote, which will preserve the order of the words in your term. For example, if I am looking for “wedding planning book”, you can see the sample result of Google here.

If I want to search for a broad math, Google will simply return results that have any words of my search term in the results. Google will try to search for:

good wedding planning book

wedding planner book

good wedding book

Here’s the sample result of a phrase match search in Google.

The phrase-to-broad ratio is calculated by taking the number of searches in the phrase match and divided by the total of searches for the broad match. Sometimes, searchers don’t find desired results with the broad match so they put their search terms into a quote and refine the searches. This ratio tells you exactly how close these search types are together. The higher Phrase-to-broad (PBR), the higher chance keywords match with the intent of the searchers.

In Market Samurai, check the Phrase-to-broad box and then hit Refresh if you don’t see a new column inserted. What we are trying to achieve is have to Phrase-to-broad ratio up to 80%. It should be ideal for good keywords to match with the searcher intention.

Summing it up

I have showed you several important metrics of good keywords today: traffic, competition, Adwords CPC and Phrase-to-broad ratio. Do you have any more metrics you would like to add? Please comment below…

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