I don’t run Adsense on this site, but I have a bunch in which I do and ever since I started optimizing them, my Adsense income has skyrocketed. Here is a method I have used with great success to improve the amount of earnings I received from sites that I run Adsense on. For some people, optimizing for Adsense is quite obvious, but for others who might be new to the world of IM, optimizing your content to improve the amount you are getting paid for your Adsense clicks might not be that obvious. Most people just slap an Adsense ad block up and pray someone clicks on it. On top of that, many people think that 5 cents a click is normal and are happy when they get an 80 cent click – “Awesome!” Many don’t know that you can consistently target higher paying clicks. I regularly target my content to receive clicks of more than $2 – if you are going to run Adsense – why not go for bigger numbers eh?
Okay, we are going to assume that you have a site that you are getting traffic to – if you don’t – stop reading this and start working on improving your site and driving traffic to it (you can sign up for my free course to learn how to do this). But back to optimization. This is by no means the “ultimate” method and it will not always receive high paying clicks – but most of your clicks will be high paying and your Adsense income will increase tremendously over what you were previously getting if you weren’t optimizing.
Let’s start with content. Adsense is contextual advertising which means it will show ads relevant to what content you have on your site/article. Let me give an insurance site as an example because the large numbers will drive home the point. Specifically, you are going to write an article on “car insurance.” You are going to have an ad block imbeded in the content – probably 250×250 upper-left like seen in the picture to the left.
Side Note: This is just a sample layout that works well for me, but you should try different ad blocks over time to see what works best for you. Change the size and the font colors to see if click through rates improve or decrease – because the changes do make a difference – this is all part of optimization.
Now “car insurance” is already a pretty good paying keyword. How much does it pay? I can’t tell you exactly, but I can tell you what Google says people will pay for ads that target the keyword phrase “car insurance” – at the time of this writing, people/companies are paying on average – $14.82 for the keyword phrase “car insurance” to be in Google’s Adwords listings. Of course you ain’t gonna get anywhere near that for people clicking on ads on your page, but you will likely receive more than $1 per click and sometimes you get lucky and will get a couple of bucks for a single click. That is pretty darn good and most people would love to have that kind of pay per click…but why not take it to the next level? How about targeting a higher paying keyword phrase? A closely related phrase to “car insurance” is “find car insurance” – a keyword phrase which commands $38.70 per click on average – yikes – I’d hate to be competing for clicks on that keyword. However, I’d love to have my Adsense ads based on that keyword as the amount I receive per click is likely to be higher than “car insurance.”
So what I do is write my article targeting “find car insurance” while being sure not to “stuff” my content with my keyword. If you stuff it, Google may just ignore your content as it is seen as spam content. Write good content and use a simple rule like 5 paragraphs to the article and 4 instances of the keyword. So long as your article is somewhere around 500 words give or take 100 either way you should be fine. However, if you want to take it to the next level, you can use a keyword density optimization tool to test your content which you can find right here: keyword density tool . You also might want to read up on latent semantic indexing (LSI) which is a fancy way of saying put other words in your content that support your keywords. This hasn’t made a big difference in my experience, but some people swear by it.
edit: This is important, I went back to review the article and left out a key point – I even changed the title – and that is the key point – the title. Make sure your title includes the keyword phrase for maximum benefit – preferably as the first part of the title. For instance, if I were targeting the keyword phrase “buy dog collar online” I might do a title like “Buy Dog Collar Online – What You Need To Know To Get The Best Deal” – wordy and gramatically incorrect, but if you’ve been paying attention, there are more things on the internet that are gramatically incorrect than correct – so no biggy. While I am editing this too, if you are using Wordpress, you can use the “All In One SEO” plugin and use a different title targeting another keyword along with a description that targets other keywords – this simply gives your article more targeted keywords.
I guess I still haven’t told you how to find these keywords yet though. Simple, just go to Google’s keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Type in your base keyword (what your article is going to be based on, or what your site is based on) and do a basic search. You will receive a bunch of keywords returned and now you need choose to display the column that show CPC (cost per click) as seen in this picture:
The results will then display what is being paid per click for the top spots for specific keywords. Click “Estimated Avg. CPC” twice to arrange the results highest to lowest and you will see something like this:
Then all you need to do is pick your keywords accordingly.
Do this search on a number of different keywords and you will notice a huge disparity in what keywords command – you’ll notice many are only .05 – what do you think you’ll be paid on that? You need to target keywords if you want to get more than pennies a month from Adsense.
As stated before, this is not necessarily the optimal way to do this, but it is an effective and easy way to find the higher paying keywords without having to buy expensive tools.
If you have another way, or any tweaks to this method, or if you have any questions, please share your thoughts with the group 
Nice article – this is pretty much the same way I do things, but I give a lot of weight to LSI – I think it makes a difference. Your point about the headline is spot-on too. I learned that on Grizz’s blog – makes a huge difference.
Wow, very cool. I didn’t really think about increasing how much I get paid. I am going to implement this right away – thanks!
thanks for the article. i use google keyword tool a lot and to be honest the highest average CPC i’ve seen for any given phrase is about 5 bucks. I don’t think i’ve ever seen higher. but his is good info I’ll definitely try to use it.
It really depends on what your category is. If you have an entertainment, automotive, travel, or electronics website (just to name a few), it’ll be harder to find good paying keywords. However, if you have a site dealing with finance, insurance or law the CPC can be incredibly high. No matter what you kind of site though, you can always optimize for the highest paying keywords in your given niche.
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