What Does It Mean " Good Keyword"

Loaded Question.. A Good Keyword can be different thing to different marketers, and markets.

For me a good keyword is a phrase which has a fair amount of searches on Google, relatively low competition, and is in a market with motivated buyers.

I like keywords with less than 30,000 competing pages, it is much easier to get ranked higher and faster the lower the number of competing pages. I prefer to see at least 50 searches per day on Google, and prefer much higher. 50 is great for categories, extra phrases, and hopefully my primary phrase is getting over 100 searches per day on Google.

Then it is time to evaluate the competition to see how entrenched they are. If they have a low level of backlinks, a beatable PR score, etc.. Then it is a really good keyword phrase.

Of course, until you test it, and find out if someone is actually buying, it is just research.

I would say that a "good keyword" needs to fulfill three criteria (at least):

- High search volume (don't want to target a keyword no one is looking for)
- Competition you can beat (more on this below)
- Targeted for your purposes (more on this below)


The first one, high search volume, is pretty obvious, so I won't elaborate.

The second one, competition, is something I see a lot of misguiding information about. Many marketers recommend you do a phrase match search (search term in quotation marks "") and see how many pages are returned. The higher that number, the more competition you have.
Now, this may be a simple, quick-to-check, primary indicator, but it is no more than that.
What really matters is the pages listed on the first page of the SERP when you do a normal search for the keyword. Look at those pages and see if you can outrank them.
What kind of pages can you outrank and what kind of pages are out of your league?
That's entirely up to you. If you have a bunch of tools and a whole team of writers at the ready, you can outrank almost any site (given enough time and effort, of course).
If all you do is some manual article writing, you should be looking for low-hanging fruit.

All I want to say is that the common advice to look for a keyword that gets "no more than x amount of phrase match results" is not very useful, IMO. Look at the pages that are ranked and evaluate whether you can beat them or not.

As for "targeted": You generally want a buying keyword. I.e. "buy x" or "buy x right now!" is better than "free x" or "x torrent download".
You also want the keyword as closely related to your actual offer as possible. If your page is a straight-up sales page, then buying keywords are best. If you are building a list, then information-seeking keywords are better suited.


The whole thing can not be entirely broken down into metrics and numbers. I don't know how else to say it, so forgive my cheesiness: There's something of an "art" to finding a good keyword.