Google's keyword CPC value accurate?

23 Sep 09 4:11 pm

Google's keyword CPC value accurate?

Hey,

I'm getting ready to launch a website in the skin-care genre and have been pounding away at my keyword research. I'm narrowing down the more "profitable" keyword by locating those with higher CPC's. I'm somewhat new to SEO but I understand in this scenario Keyword A would ultimately be more profitable, or have the potential of bringing more profit than Keyword B, despite keyword B's significantly higher traffic/day (with the assumption you place in top-10):

Keyword A (search traffic/day: 100, CPC: $5.00) = $500/day
Keyword B (search traffic/day: 1,000, CPC: $0.40) = $100/day

This leads to one problem, everyone says traffic is king, but traffic that buys is god. However, the above methodology relies 100% on the accuracy of Google's CPC estimates. If you're targetting a much smaller traffic stream, they better actually be buying. I know over time you would track and analyse these keywords and figure it out for yourself through sales figures, but without these resources doing startup keyword research, does anyone have any words of wisdom on the accuracy of Google's CPC estimates?

I recently read this post on Market Samuri's forum:
http://www.noblesamurai.com/forum/topic ... et-samurai

The admin's response sounds like a wisely crafted sales-pitch, and I'm 100% confident it is. But it definitely made me question myself for relying on a resource which may be the achilies heal of my startup keyword campaigns.

Thanks for any advice on this