SEO is all about getting visitors to your site that have searched for specific keywords in the Search Engines. Effective SEO is when the keywords that drive the visitors to your site, result in subscribers or customers that put money in your pocket. Getting down to the fundamentals, if you target the wrong keywords you may get lots of traffic but, if it doesn’t achieve the results you are looking for, normally cash, then what is the point.

Keyword research tools will give you long lists of keywords that you can target but you will only find out which ones will result in a positive response to what you are offering if you test. You might think that you already know which keywords will bring in the cash, and you might be right, but what if you are wrong. Hours, maybe even days or weeks, of wasted effort targeting traffic that will never give you a return. There is no substitute for testing, no shortcut, no secret pill. And how do you get the traffic to test the profitability of different keywords? That depends on how quick you want to know the results.

When I need to know the answer quickly, which is almost always the case, I use Adwords. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money and, if your instincts are anywhere near right, you should be able to make a return on your testing or at least cover your costs. If you can’t at least generate a small return before you use up your testing budget (for me that is normally $30-$40 per campaign), you need to move on. Why? Because, even if you eventually get free traffic to those keywords you won’t earn anything so don’t waste your time. If you break even on certain keywords they can still generate a decent income in the future when the traffic is free, so they are Cash Keywords, worth investing your time and SEO efforts in.