Making money online can be quite hard, especially if you are looking to monetize your blog solely via ads.
To be a successful Adsense publisher you need a lot of traffic but you also need that traffic to engage with the ads that are being displayed on your site.
The adsense CPC that you get paid will depend on the topics that you write about.
In the world of blogging, you can either write articles that will compete for clicks that will pay a few cents or be strategic and write content that will pay the big bucks.
If you are serious about making money online with Adsense and building a successful business, I suggest you target these top paying keywords and industries.
Also, I suggest you try Ezoic to automatically automize your ads.
I broke down this post by:
- Top paying Adsense keyword industries
- Types of ads that pay the most
- Exact long-tail keywords that have insane CPCs
Here are the top 10 highest paid Adsense keywords for 2021 (by industry/niche):
- Insurance $61 CPC
- Gas/Electricity $58 CPC
- Loans $50 CPC
- Mortgage $46 CPC
- Attorney $48 CPC
- Lawyer $42 CPC
- Donate $42 CPC
- Conference Call $42 CPC
- Degree $40 CPC
- Credit $38 CPC
Why do these Adsense keywords pay so much?
Because the companies behind the ads have a high customer value and can afford to spend a few hundred bucks to acquire a customer. It all boils down to their business economics.
So, how can you profit from this data and rake in thousands of dollars each month?
Let’s run through a hypothetical example.
- You notice that insurance related blogs will carry a high CPC.
- You then research a few keywords and find that “car insurance companies” pays decently well.
- You get to writing the best article you can on car insurance companies
- With an amazing on-page SEO, you are able to get your blog post high on google rankings,
- You get a good amount of high quality organic traffic to your site, and then monetize into more Adsense revenue.
Which Adsense ads pay the most?
In addition to picking the best niche for adsense, you also have options as to which ad type to show. The options are: 1) text & display 2) matched content 3) in-feed and 4) in-article.
In my own experiments, I’ve found higher click through rates with native in-article ads. Those ads perform the best on any of my sites.
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| In-Article Ads |
The in-article ads will naturally blend with your content and display midway through your blog post. I like these types of ads because they are contextual and usually receive a good amount of clicks.
Sidebar ads are not as good since we are already trained to tune them out.
You can also try Matched Content if you have another content you’d like to promote.
Pro tip: Use Auto Ads by Google
Adsense Auto Ads take advantage of machine learning and place themselves automatically on your site where Google thinks they will perform well.
Google has been testing the Auto Ads feature as a beta since September of 2017 and recently (early March) released this feature to everyone.
Since Google has millions (if not billions) of sites to test, they will most likely be better than you or me when figuring out the right type and placement of the ads.
The only downside of this is that you won’t have much control of how many ads are shown or where they are placed, which if you are picky, might annoy you.
To set up Auto ads on your site, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your AdSense account.
- In the left navigation panel, click My ads.
- Click Auto ads.
- On the “Choose your global settings” page, use the controls to select the ad formats that you’d like to show.
- Leave Automatically get new formats selected if you want AdSense to automatically add new ad formats to your global settings as they become available.
- Click Save.
- On the “Place code on your page” page, click Copy code.
- Paste the ad code between the <head> and </head> tags of each page where you want to show Auto ads. If you’re not sure how to do this, see Google’s Code implementation guide.
Bonus Keyword Industries/Niches
Here are other high paying keywords that you can target in your blog posts
- Treatment $41 CPC
- Software $39 CPC
- Classes $36 CPC
- Recovery $34 CPC
- Trading $33 CPC
- Rehab $33 CPC
- Hosting $31 CPC
- Transfer $29 CPC
- Cord Blood $27 CPC
- Claim $25 CPC
Which exact keywords pay the most CPC on Adsense?
SEMrush did a nice study on some of the best keywords by country here.
If you are looking for exact top paying keywords such as mesothelioma which pays $1000+ per click, you can check out the list compiled of 1M+ adsense keywords by GrepWords. For instance, they reported the ultimate top paying keyword “mesothelioma survival rates” at $1006.56 per click.
Here are a few of my favorite top paid keywords per industry found through SEMRush (data for 2017, 2018 and 2019, 2020):
Mesothelioma Keywords sorted by CPC
Mesothelioma is a type of cancer that lines the lungs, stomach, heart, and other organs, and unfortunately can’t be cured. Nevertheless, treatment can help reduce the pain. People that contracted mesothelioma did so at their jobs so that is why you see searches like “mesothelioma attorneys”, “mesothelioma law firms” and “mesothelioma compensation”.
This is a very competitive keyword set so unless you can outrank WebMD and MayoClinic, I suggest you look for other industries.
Bitcoin CPC Adsense KWs
I threw this one in because the crypto space is just so hot right now. These keywords are not the highest paying on my article roundup but I expect their cost per click to rise in the coming years.
Aside: I personally just love blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Actually, I love it so much that with my company Flux Ventures we launched an entire division just to buy and sell bitcoin and alt-coins.
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| Bitcoin CPC Adsense KWs |
Find more high paying keywords using Search Console
Did you know that Google already provides you with the keywords that you rank for?
What if you could optimize your existing blog posts to target even better keywords?
Instead of spending tons of hours writing a thorough post, you could use update an old one and pick juicier keywords.
Here’s how.
- Install the Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
- Head to the Search Analytics under the Google Webmasters Tools
- Choose your website
- Be sure to check the Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position boxes at the top
- google webmaster adsense keywords
- Filter by any specific page that you want keywords to show for: i.e. https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/
- Since you installed the Keywords Everywhere tool you will see an additional 3 columns on your list, namely: Monthly Volume, CPC and Competition
- how to find high cpc keywords
- Unfortunately you can’t sort by CPC so you will have to copy all the data into a spreadsheet and sort it there. I suggest you hit the Show 500 rows at the bottom of Webmaster tools.
- I made a Google sheet for you that you can copy (File > Make a Copy..) to sort all your keywords.
- Copy and paste all your keywords, and then hit the arrow on the column of CPC and sort from Z->A
- top paying keywords adsense
- Voila, you will see all the keywords that your blog post ranks for, all ranked from highest CPC to lowest CPC.
As you can see this last trick will yield keywords that might not be applicable to your blog post. In my case, “mesothelioma lawyer directory” does not apply to this specific post so I will just ignore it.
However, it will also find keywords that I am already getting impressions like “top paying keywords” but for which I am still ranked on page #2. The secret here is now to extend my existing blog post to include that new keyword so that my page gets bumped to page #1.
Pro tip: You can also sort by Volume or competition to find other hidden gems.
(Remember that now with the new RankBrain algorithm you shouldn’t target each specific long tail keyword but rather target medium-tail keywords that cover a broader topic.)
So, how can you make $100 a day with Adsense?
I don’t know about you, but 100 bucks a day on ads sounds like a good passive income to me ($3k/mo).
Let’s run some calculations to see what it would take to make $100/day on Adsense.
First, some assumptions.
- You are targeting US readers (as we saw earlier, US ads pay the most on average)
- Your CTR (click-through rate) is 1% (i.e. 1% of visitors click on ads)
- Your CPC is $0.50 (your niche is strong but your site is just getting started)
- Your RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions) is $2
? Btw, you can increase your earnings using Ezoic. (an ad tester platform)
With these numbers we can now calculate how many visitors we need to earn our target amount.
The formula is = Visitors * CTR * CPC + Visitors/1000 * RPM
So with 15,000 visitors per day we obtain around $100/day on Adsense.
(15,000 * 1% * $0.5 + 15,000/1000*$2 = $105/day)
But how do you obtain 15,000 page views per day? Is that reasonable?
Yes, it is reasonable. To do that, you can either
- Produce 15 articles that get 1000 page views (hard)
- Produce 150 articles that get 100 page views (much easier)
Learn how to write articles that will attract a lot of visitors.
Want learn how to get more organic visitors? Check this out!
Tips for Youtube CPC
In case you were wondering the same steps apply if you are looking to grow your earnings on Youtube. The same industries, languages and countries discussed above will also do well on YT.
To further optimize your Youtube earnings, you should also include a thorough description of your video that includes the high paying keywords you are targeting
Conclusion
- I hope you found this list of high cost-per-click keywords useful.
- I also hope you liked the strategy to find keywords that your competitors are getting money from. If you want additional tools to find keywords, head to my SEO tools list.
- Building a high grossing blog is a combination of picking a solid niche, doing SEO on your articles and having fun while at it.
- If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment and share this article with a friend.
