How Much "Exact Match" Traffic Makes A Keyword "Good"?

[creature]

Any experienced folks out there care to throw out Google Keyword search "exact match" numbers you use as a threshold for discarding that keyword as a possible good source of revenue?

[daveyace]

it depends what your doing, is it for affiliate marketing?

[Jon Patrick]

It's hard to come up with a simple answer to that question, as you also have to factor in the amount of competition before you can come to any conclusions. A keyword with a high monthly search volume and lots of competition may actually present less opportunity than one with a low monthly search volume and low competition.

[Awesome1]

for my latest affiliate marketing efforts I have been using exact match keywords with 100,000 to 500,000 under 100 to little traffic over 500 to much competiton

[kaper7]

More info is needed to answe this question. Do in keep in mind that a few thousand searches per month with low competition for niche marketing is a norm.

[Richard Van]

For me it would depend on what the phrase was.

There's a big difference between certain phrases.

I may get a lot more exact match searches for company formation but I'd probably be able to get a more serious buyer with less searches and buy a shelf company today.

[Tom Ryan]

I like to focus on keywords that are around 100 visitors/day. However, no keyword tool is 100% accurate, that being said I've gotten thousands of visitors in a month from keywords that claimed to only get a couple hundred visitors a month. The opposite is true as well. I've targeted keywords there were supposed to bring thousands of visitors per month and only received a handful of visitors.

So I usually use keywords that cover a full range of searches on my sites.

[GeorgR.]

Why you Don’t Get Any Sales! Internet Marketing Math Explained

In a nutshell, a keyword (yes, EXACT match) must have enough search volume to be profitable...even a "6000 searches per month" keyword will hardly make you any money..even on top google position.

I started long ago to focus only on high traffic keywords with several THOUSAND exact match searches per day. Everything else is merely good for peanuts.

As you can see on my blog entry above, there is just so many factors (click through, conversion rate etc.) where you simply NEED high traffic volume.

Also..in terms of SEO and ranking i found that "super keywords" are not harder to rank than "micro niches"..there is NO reason whatsoever to limit yourself to low search volume keywords..or overly focus on "competition" and only use so called "low competition keywords". ..at the end you will end up with very little traffic....and you could do high search volume keywords instead, even super keywords like "lose weight", "free ipad" etc... as long as your site is relevant and has quality content it's all doable.

[creature]

Originally Posted by daveyace

it depends what your doing, is it for affiliate marketing?

Yes - mainly for affiliate marketing. When I started I did not do proper research and used "broad" mathch stats.

I have noted that of my 3 sites, the 2 that have more than 1,000 exact matches for my keyword (using Google Keyword tool) get decent traffic, but the one that has only about 250 "exact" matches was for all practical purposes a waste of time - no income.

Just wondered if the 1,000 was a reasonable threshold.

BTW - my site that has about 1,000 "exact match" data actually gets about 2-3000 unique page views.day

[petelta]

It depends completely on what and how you want to sell. As GeorgR. stated, big keywords are the only ones that will pull enough weight alone to make any real money...

But, don't let that count out small searched keywords too. I will focus an entire domain on keywords that receive at least 1,500 searches per month, but other factors for the keyword must be really good for this to happen. For example, it needs to be a buyer's keyword (and more than likely a product specific keyword), extremely low competition, and something I feel I can do only a small amount of work to see some results.

I like going for highly searched keywords too, but when you create a system for tackling small buyer's keywords, it's an easily outsourced business model that grows quickly.

The more appropriate range I will create a micro-site around is 5,000+ searches a month.

[zaza1989]

It depends on what you do .... website for adsense, I have to give more attention to competition (in addition to monthly searches and cpc).
For affiliate website, I do not know, I am not good in that area

Originally Posted by creature

Any experienced folks out there care to throw out Google Keyword search "exact match" numbers you use as a threshold for discarding that keyword as a possible good source of revenue?

[SalahStudios]

There is really no right answer to that, it really depends on the battles you like to fight. I will personally target keywords with as little as a couple hundred searches if I'm making a site with tons of content (and I usually make sites with tons of content because you'll often do well with little or no off-site SEO for the "low hanging fruit". The right quantities of low hanging fruit can make a true feast pretty quickly.

[FraserC]

I know you're getting a lot of "it all depends" answers here, but... it all depends.

You need to consider the value of the search traffic and the competition. If you're in a really competitive niche, like loans and poker, you might want to go after keywords that get just a handful of visitors a month. Even if an article gives you a handful of visitors, each one is so valuable, that it's totally worth it.

But if you're in a high traffic, low competition niche... like mine, you might want to throw out anything less than 1,000 exact match visitors a month.

You need to figure that out on your own, with your own niche. The way you figure this out is to write a bunch of exploratory articles. Write articles targeting various exact match levels and see what brings in visitors. Then calculate how much you're earning per article. That should give you a good idea.

In general, though, I prefer to target longer tail, lower volume keywords. I'd much rather get a large variety of traffic coming from different keywords than battling over a head keyword.

[DrewDaze]

I have exact match domains with as few as 4000 searches a month pulling in a couple dollars a day from adsense, as well as a couple affiliate sales a month. Worth the thiry minutes it took for me to set the wordpress blog up? I think so...

[Raul991]

I used to take 2400 searches a month as a minimum criteria, but now after I have spent so much time on keyword research and built up my own system to find high traffic/low competition keywords I take 5400 as a minimum. The more searches the better of course

But if I am building an authority site then I will take keywords that have much lower searches and build hundreds of pages. It all adds up.

Of course it is your own decision, like for example if you have your own product to promote and you have set up a nice follow up email campaigns then the searches could be lower.

[JSProjects]

As a few others have said, don't ignore the "mindset" of the keyword.

I'd much prefer 500 exact searches for "affordable laptop computer" over 5,000 for "laptop computer brands."

Seems subtle. But there is a BIG difference in the two.

[AskAnAffiliate]

When your using the Google Keyword Tool, you'll have to pay close attention to competition, global searches. If your going to be running a campaign with Google Adwords, pay close attention to the CPC per word as well.

It depends obviously on what your selling, but who really cares about exact word matches if the global search volume if very low. This means that you are configuring your site or even campaign for an exact word search but are not getting the right amount of hits because of the global search volume being low.

It is recommended by many that if your site if very new go with a broad search and have traffic brought to your site, you never know this might pay off and some people may form some links into your site. After a few months transfer over to exact matches and start building a base that way.

Contact me if you have any further questions or even reply back.

Cheers,

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by Awesome1

for my latest affiliate marketing efforts I have been using exact match keywords with 100,000 to 500,000 under 100 to little traffic over 500 to much competiton

Im sorry .. Huh? what does this mean?

[Tony W]

I only go after KWs that have over 1600 [exact match] in Google KW tool. Any less than that I feel like it's a waste of time.

[outwest]

Who says you are only going to get traffic from ONE kw? is that your goal?
I thought the goal was to take about 20 kws and cumulately the traffic to those kws adds up to a ton of traffic and that will make you money

i dont think many people structure their plan around one kw

[FraserC]

outwest is exactly right. Last month I had 2.3 million search visitors from 620,000 different keywords. I have no idea how well I rank for any one keyword.

Which keyword do I target? I target them all.

[JettH]

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

Also..in terms of SEO and ranking i found that "super keywords" are not harder to rank than "micro niches"..there is NO reason whatsoever to limit yourself to low search volume keywords..or overly focus on "competition" and only use so called "low competition keywords". ..at the end you will end up with very little traffic....and you could do high search volume keywords instead, even super keywords like "lose weight", "free ipad" etc... as long as your site is relevant and has quality content it's all doable.

Some interesting assertions here.
I would love know exactly what you mean by "doable".

For example, what if I bought the site about weight loss that's for sale in your signature, and then used the SEO services for sale in your signature to rank it for "lose weight"? Is that doable?

And exactly how much would "doable" cost?

[kayetaylor]

3,000 local searches and low competition according to google sniper 2.

[outwest]

I think people who say is 3000 local searches a good thing to aim for is that something I can rank number one on easier? Makes absolutely no sense
has nothing to do with anything, that number

All that matters is the backlinks and PR of the top 5 sites On Google competition

I dont care if the SEOC says 100 million (most people like to aim for 100k)
I never even look at that number, because it is irrelevant

I guess its good though that most webmasters dont know whats important for SEO
more kws for the rest of us

[Michael Nguyen]

Originally Posted by creature

Any experienced folks out there care to throw out Google Keyword search "exact match" numbers you use as a threshold for discarding that keyword as a possible good source of revenue?

Know your numbers.

Ask yourself this:

How much money can I make out of this keywords.
How much traffic can I expect to see.
How long will it take to get there.
Is the ROI good for the time spent on it.

With my car clients, we can afford to target low volume keyword eg
20-50 searches per month because our transaction value is very high.

Again depends on niche and what you ROI is. Know your numbers.
Recent studies show that #1 rankings (with PPC ad above) gets 18.2% of the search traffic, I can verify this with my own data.

I hope this helps.

Thanks