Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding out what people are searching for online and how valuable those searchers can be to your business. The value of some searches can be surprisingly high and that is one of the principle reasons why Google makes so much money: advertisers are prepared to pay a great deal to get clicks on their ads when specific, high value searches are done.

The easiest way to consider the value of a search is to work backwards from the value of a sale. So suppose you are a cosmetic surgeon and you make $15,000 from a new client. Suppose further that it takes 10 sales lead to get a client. Each sales lead is then worth a potential $1,500 in revenue.

If it takes 10 clicks to the surgeon’s website to generate a sales lead, each click is worth $150 in revenue. If the surgeon decides he/she is willing to spend 30% of his/her income on revenue generation then they are willing to be $45 per click for traffic from the right sort of people i.e. people in their area who have money and who are willing to pay $15,000 for surgery. The right sort of traffic is likely to consist of people doing searches like “best cosmetic surgeon manhattan” if the surgeon is in the Manhattan area of New York.

Of course if you don’t make that much per sale you won’t want to pay anything like $45 a click unless you think the lifetime value of a new customer is massive. So someone selling drinking canteens will probably only want to spend a few cents getting a click.

Thus the value of a keyword is intrinsically linked to the value someone using it as a search term is to a business. In the case of QR codes, when you consider the value of a scan you can equate it roughly to the value of a search done on Google by someone for a keyword related to your business but with one key difference: when someone does a search on Google they nearly always see (and often click) ads for your competitors too.

When someone scans your QR Code, your competitors are usually nowhere to be seen which actually makes your scan more valuable.

So how do you find the value of a particular search keyword? The easiest way is to use a tool like Google’s keyword planner. You can access this via your Google Ads account if you have one.