Who’ll Read You? Finding the Traffic Potential of Your Writing.
© 2012 by Aurelio Locsin.
Whether you’re writing on the Internet out of love for words or to make money, you want as many readers as possible. While visitors to your hubs can come from other other hubs, related websites, or links that you post on forums, the chief source of those visitors is Google. Users enter a keyword into the search engine, the search results show a link to your hub, they click the link and then visit your page. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many visitors your effort can potentially receive?
Adwords Keyword Tool
Google offers the Adwords Keyword tool for showing the potential traffic to any web page, including your hubs. You may find this useful to see why certain hubs receive a lot of traffic and others don’t. You can also use this tool on popular web pages to see what subjects are popular. You can then consider writing hubs on more visited keywords to boost your traffic.
Caution
This only works for non-fiction works. Google has no way of judging writing except by subject, so if your writing is a poem about sunsets, it will key into “sunsets” and not the literary value of the poem.
Click the image to see it full-size. Be sure to enlarge the window to the biggest screen size. If it is still too small, right-click the image and save it to your hard drive. Then open it with your favorite image program.
1. Sign into the Adwords Keyword tool.
Use your Google username and password. It’s free to register. Although you can use the tool without signing in, some of the features are disabled.
2. Click “[Exact]” under Match Types.
It is located in the left panel under Tools.
3. Enter the name of the hub you want to check into the “Website” box.
The box is located in the right panel. For this example, I’m using one of my more popular hubs Highest Paid Lawyers in America, which puts the following link into the “Website” box:
http://alocsin.hubpages.com/hub/Highest-Paid-Lawyers-in-America-Where-Attorneys-Make-the-Best-Salaries
4. Click “Advanced Options and Filters.”
This is located in the right panel and reveals the options box.
- Choose “All Countries” under Location and Languages, and “English” under All Languages.
- Click the “Search” button. Scroll down the page until you come to the Keyword Ideas section. Make sure the “Keyword Ideas” tab is selected and NOT “Ad Group Ideas.”
- Click the “Global Monthly Searches” title until a downward arrow appears. This sorts the column in descending order – from highest to lowest.
Click the "Search" button.
Scroll down the page until you come to the Keyword Ideas section.
- Make sure the “Keyword Ideas” tab is selected and NOT “Ad Group Ideas.”
- Click the “Global Monthly Searches” title until a downward arrow appears. This sorts the column in descending order – from highest to lowest.
Reading the Report
The report shows the potential keywords used to search for your page, and the number of monthly searches for each keyword around the world. The higher the number of searches, the more likely it is that anyone will find your hub. As you can see, my hub has several highly-searched keywords:
- Lawyer: 110,000
- Attorney: 60,500
- Highest paying jobs: 40,500
- Free legal advice: 33,100
- Lawyer salary: 14,800
This represents only the potential traffic, not actual traffic. In reality, the actual number of visitors for a page depends on the Competition, which ideally should be “Low”, as well as the actual ranking of the page in Google search. My hub gets about 300 visits a month.
Account
Put your main hub site in the “Website” box to view the traffic potential of all your hubs. This example uses “alocsin.hubpages.com.” Don’t forget to click the “Search” button. In this case, the number of keywords and monthly searches are the following:
- High paying jobs: 12.100
- Money Making: 8,100
- Extra Cash: 5,400
Note that these numbers will change depending on what topics HubPages decides to feature on my page when Google runs its report.
The searches aren’t quite as high as my Lawyer Salary hub because the report generalizes information from several of the hubs featured on the page. The relatively low number of searches also explains why as of November 2012, I’m ranked 97 among the top most visited hubbers, instead of near the top.
Comparisons
Let’s compare my figures to that of nadeeshan301, the most visited hubber in November 2012. (They represent a group of doctors from Sri Lanka.) Putting “nadeeshan301.hubpages.com” into the “Website” box reveals the following keywords and monthly searches:
- Breast cancer: 246,000
- Prostate cancer: 165,000
- Diabetes symptoms: 135,000
- Lung cancer: 135,000
- Cancer research: 74,000
As you can see, their topics have much higher traffic potential than mine. Small wonder that they are on top. Try putting nadeeshan301’s individual hubs into the tool to see how each does.
What to Do
How can this tool help you?
- First, find out the traffic potential of your individual hubs, and of your entire site.
- Then compare those numbers with those of the top hubbers listed in my Top 100 hub. Check out what topics (keywords) they write on and how many visitors they get.
If you’d like to get more visitors, write hubs on similar highly-searched keywords.
Let me know in the Comments box below what the Adwords Keyword tool revealed about your hubs and searches.
