The next step is finding which keywords to target.

Are we going to target the difficult keyword with 60,500 searches per month or are we going to go for the easy 170 searches per month keyword?

It all comes down to one thing: Revenue to Time ratio.

How much money can we make based on the time we spend on that keyword?

And that depends on two things:

• How profitable is this keyword to us
• How difficult is it to rank for the keyword

Finding keywords to target

My weapon of choice here is SEO Power Suite’s Rank Tracker. With this tool, I`ll be able to give you an answer on how profitable will this keyword be, and how difficult is this keyword.

• Blue = How much visitors can we expect to receive if we get to the #1 position.
• Orange = How difficult is this keyword in the SERPs.
• Purple = Some of the calculations used in calculating the difficulty of a keyword.

In our case, I would want to target these keywords:

• scholarship applications – 10,362 potential visits – 30.4 difficulty
• minority scholarship – 15,485 potential visits – 43.9 difficulty
• scholarships for high school seniors – 5,659 potential visits- 37.0 difficulty
• graduate school scholarships – 3,785 potential visits – 37.1 difficulty

Since all of these 4 keywords are different, we will create 4 different content for each of these 4 keywords.

If our website is structured in this way:

• Home > Get free money for college > Scholarships

Then in the Scholarships page, we will have links pointing to 4 of these content pages. Something like this.

Home
– Get free money for college
— Scholarships
—— Scholarship applications
—— Scholarships for minorities
—— Scholarships for high school seniors
—— Scholarships for graduates

The benefit of this structure is that when anyone links to the Scholarship page, all the 4 different content will also get the link juice and vice versa.

How profitable is this keyword

Lastly, the most important question is how profitable is this keyword to us. The way I calculate this is by setting up a goal on each of the landing page.

Let’s say, our goal is to collect leads for a private student loan offer.

There are 2 metrics that we need to find out here:

• Metric 1: How much is 1 lead worth to us
• Metric 2: What is the conversion rate when visitors land on each of these pages

Let’s say…

• 1 lead is worth $50
• Conversion rate is 3%
• Estimate visits for ranking #1 is 15,000/month

That would mean the revenue potential for the keyword is $22,500/month (3% of 15,000 * $50).

Next up, we`ll be able to structure our site according to our keywords.