Cost Per Click (CPC) shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click on an ad displayed on top of search results for a given keyword. It’s more a metric for advertisers than SEOs, but it can serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value.
For example, the keyword “project management software” has a pretty high CPC of $30. That’s because people searching for it seem to be looking for a product to buy.
But it’s a different story for “project management methodologies.” This is clearly an informational search query, and the odds of selling your project management software to these people are not as high—hence, the much lower CPC of $6.
One important thing to know about CPC is that it’s much more volatile than search volume. While the search demand for most keywords stays roughly the same from month to month, their CPC can change any minute as more companies display ads for them.
This means that the CPC values that you see in various SEO tools are merely snapshots in time and aren’t particularly precise. If you want to get real-time CPC data, it is recommended that you use AdWords.
Part 4
How to target keywords
A very important step in analyzing keywords is to identify what kind of page you’ll need to create in order to maximize your chances to rank. And if you can use that page to target a group of relevant keywords all at once. Or perhaps create a few additional pages to target some of the keywords individually.
Let’s explore how you determine those things.
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