Different Tools, Different Reasons
Let me try and break the groups down....
Search Engine Optimizers do research to refine what words they should focus on so their pages rank well in organic search results (free search engines). They want to know things such as the most popular keywords in their niche, and whether people search using plural or singular - recipe or recipes.
Niche Miners try to discover products that have a good demand but are not well catered for. They like to sort through large numbers of keywords to locate these kinds of opportunities. Once they have identified an opportunity they either get a product or products of their own to sell, or promote other people's products as an affiliate.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers are looking for cheap keywords to bid on to send their website inexpensive traffic. They attempt to locate overlooked, yet relevant keywords to bid on using PPC search engines such as Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) and Google AdWords.
AdSense publishers are on the flipside. They're looking for expensive keywords. They monetize their website traffic by displaying advertisements using the Google AdSense program. This program allows you to place code on your website that displays ads that are related to the content on your pages. For example, a page on digital cameras will display ads related to digital cameras.
If you're an AdSense publisher, you want to find topics that are paying the highest amounts. These amounts are determined by what people are willing to pay on Google AdWords. For example if you have a website on digital cameras you will want to find out the topics that are paying the most so you can cover them on your website. For example, people are paying 56 cents for the keyword phrase “choose digital camera”, but they are paying ten times that amount ($5.39) for the keyword phrase “smallest digital camera”.
Another example would be if you had a website on timeshare. You would be wise to create a page targeted at the keyword phrase “sell a timeshare” which people are paying $23.81 instead of “time share resale” which goes for $6.33. You can see these small differences can make a huge impact on your bottom line. This means you'll be paid more per click on the ads on those pages because people are willing to pay more to have their ad displayed for those more profitable niche markets.
Article Series
This article is part 2 of a 2 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:
- Keyword Research Concepts
- Different Tools, Different Reasons
I found all you articles highly informative since I am just starting to look into "keyword research". They took a lot of the confusion out of trying to understand just what all of this is about. Thanks for writing them!