The never-ending struggle that all adsense publishers face is how to increase the cpc and rpm. Higher rpm means higher earnings.
The golden solution recommended by all “online gurus” is to use high cpc keywords, which is a BIG MISTAKE. Publishing content around high cpc keywords will very likely NOT increase your adsense rpm or earnings, and there are reasons as to why.
Most people fail to understand how the Adsense/Adwords engine works under the hood and I would admit that it took me several years to figure out myself.
Some would say that adsense is dead and there is no more money to be made using adsense on your blog or websites. But yet there are lots of successful bloggers making pretty impressive earnings from their niche websites or blogs using just adsense.
So what is the secret or key to getting high RPMs on adsense. It is NOT by using high cpc keywords.
My own results
Very recently (in 2020) I did some changes to one of my websites which doubled my RPM over-night. The chances I made were more targeted towards SEO to increase traffic, but the side effect was increase in adsense earnings which was an unusual surprise. So I decided to carefully look into it and finally figured out what had happened.
In this article I shall be presenting those little hacks that I did to my website and you can benefit from them as well, unless you already have a perfect website.
1. Publish niche focused content
The best way to improve your adsense earning is to publish content focused around one particular niche rather than multiple different and possibly unrelated topics.
The adsense crawler or engine looks at the content on your website and tries to figure out what it is about and what keywords match with it. It not only looks at the individual page, but the overall website.
If you publish posts on random things then adsense might consider your website to be a general blog and will be reluctant to serve high cpc ads on it.
So its important to publish only niche focused content, so that your entire website looks like an authority website on a certain topic.
The Theory
A website on pet dogs that has plenty of articles on dogs is seen as a better placement for ads, compared to a general mom blog that has a few posts about her own pet dog and then some other posts on travelling and cooking.
A niche authority blog is more likely to attract high paying ads compared to a general blog.
2. Remove Thin Content Pages
Thin Content means content that offers little value to the user or reader on your website. There are lots of page on regular websites that are of little value.
Another way to understand thin content is to see if a particular page can actually rank on google or will google rank it for any useful search term.
Example of thin content pages on wordpress blogs
On wordpress blogs there are typically lots of such pages that do not contain any useful content for users.
For example:
- 1. Media attachment pages – Pages that display the image with a title and nothing else.
- 2. Tag pages – For example, site.com/tag/recipes/. Create tags only when necessary and don’t create too many of them thinking that they would help in seo. They don’t
- 3. Posts on topics or keywords that are not really being searched by anyone.
If you are running a blog or website you should be aware that such pages usually don’t rank for any useful search query (check your google search console data).
Hence these are thin content pages. And it is better to not have them on your website.
Based on what I have seen on some of my websites, too many thin content pages lowers your adsense RPM, and holds the adsense engine from serving high cpc ads to your website. This could happen through multiple ways. For example serving irrelevant ads that lower the CTR, serving low paying ads that lower your average cpc and so on.
There could be many reasons for this. Due to so many thin content pages mixed with your posts, either adsense is unable to properly figure out the main keywords for your website, or the keyword density gets diluted, which makes adsense think that your website is poor quality. This is bad for SEO as well.
Check your website index
Search google using the site operator, site:yoursite.com and see what pages are indexed. Ideally you should see mostly those pages in google’s index that you actually want your users to see in search results, that is the POSTS or PAGES.
If you see large number of pages that should not be there in google’s index, then its time to fix them.
Here is what you can do to remove such pages:
1. Media attachment pages –
Redirect all media attachment pages to the actual attachment file, like the jpg or png, so that it is not counted as a content page. Most modern themes do it by default. Or you could use the Yoast seo plugin to do it for you.
2. Too many un-necessary Tag pages –
Remove un-necessary tags that you may have created years ago without even realising. Only keep the most important ones.
3. Low Quality Posts –
Remove posts that have little content that google cannot understand properly.
Or improve such posts by adding more keyword targeted content to such posts so that google finds them worthy of ranking.
Note: I did this change to one of my websites and saw a significant bump in my adsense RPM over-night (like within 3 days).
3. Remove or Restructure non targeted content
Content that is not targeted towards answering some popular search query will be useless as it cannot drive organic traffic and neither improve adsense earnings.
For example, some event from your personal life or some story that you came up with or your thoughts on some social subject. Topics like these are likely not being searched by other internet users, and have no useful keywords associated with them that advertisers can bid on.
If you have such content on your blog that were just casual posts about your personal experiences, then chances of getting any significant organic traffic on them is quite dim.
Its an excellent idea to blend some content that targets popular search terms with all such posts so that google can find them more easily. If you have old posts that are not about any specific topic or keyword, then either consider removing them if they are not helpful, or try restructuring them with more content and information that can make them useful for users.
In rather simple words, every post on your site or blog should target some keyword that has search volume on google directly or indirectly. That way you have better chances of generating organic traffic and eventually higher adsense earnings and RPM.
4. Target commercial & buyer keywords in content
Commercial or buyer keywords attract visitors who intend to buy something. Somebody searching for “best dog harness” is looking for buy something. These are the lucrative keywords that advertisers in respective niches would target for their google ads.
If you can build and publish content around such buyer keywords, you shall attract more ads from such advertisers.
Commercial keywords vs High CPC keywords
Commercial and high cpc keywords are not all the same. There is a slight difference in the way you chose them for building content ideas.
High CPC keywords are the ones that report high cpc inside adwords keyword planner. Its an indication that advertisers are paying a higher amount of money for showing their ads for those keywords. Targeting such high cpc keywords is correct in theory but has lots of challenges.
There is no guarantee that adsense will show high paying ads on your site, just because you publish content around high cpc keywords. Adsense is smarter than you think!
Buyer keywords on the other hands are keywords that have buyer intent, but may not report a high cpc value in google adwords. These keywords are equally valuable and could have lots of long tail variants that are not only easier to rank, but also give you lots of content opportunities.
Publishing more content around buyer intent long tail keyword sends out positive signals to google that your website is an authority on that particular topic and google will start serving high cpc ads on your site.
5. Publish long form content
It’s well known fact that google favours content that is long and rich. This does not mean that if you write a 10,000 word article you would rank #1 right away.
Long form content is more about presenting the user with as much useful information as is possible in a post. This makes your post look “authoritive” to google’s eyes and you can expect some reward in return.
And on the other side it has a positive effect on adsense as well. Any piece of content that answers multiple query keywords will be deemed fit for serving high quality ads in that niche.
If you look like an expert on a topic, adsense will be more inclined towards showing better ads on your website.
Conclusion
The overall strategy is to publish niche targeted long form content around popular keywords and get rid of thin content on your website. Doing so should bring in some extra income through adsense.
After you implement these changes, wait for about a month to see the results, and then measure your stats inside adsense reports. Hopefully you would see nice things.
If you want to learn how to build niche sites that can make money from adsense, check out other posts on this site.
And if you do benefit from these strategies, then let me know in the comments below. Would be glad to hear your success story.
Links and Resources
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/190436?hl=en