Choosing between keywords

[knite]

Hey guys, IM newbie here. I've been reading threads for a few days and I'm ready to dip my toes in the water.

I've chosen to go with an EMD trying to earn money from contextual Adsense. I have two keywords I'm considering, and I'm a bit unclear on how to choose between them.

Both are EMDs of the form word1-word2.com.

KW 1
100K local searches
Competition high
CPC $3.65, Contextual suggested bid $1.17
500K hits

KW2
250K local searches
Competition medium
CPC $.63, contextual suggested bid $.81
6M hits

How do I determine the difficulty of ranking for a keyword, and how "good" it is is? Almost all of the case studies and guides on WF suggest choosing KWs with <3K local searches. Is this because the local searches number is the easiest/best metric for difficulty?

"Competition" seems to indicate how many advertisers are bidding on the keyword, which suggests that high competition is a good thing. CPC only indicates the price for showing an ad in search results. Does this mean I should ignore CPC and only look at suggested bid in the Contextual Targeting Tool?

I haven't seen people discussing the total number of hits (results). I've included it here for the sake of being thorough. Does this number matter?

In summary, what information should I consider when choosing a keyword?

:: puts on flame-retardant clothing for his first post ::

 

[Mightier]

Check the competition's on-page SEO (there's a good thread here somewhere about it). Check the number of backlinks they have and glance through the backlink profile to get a sense of their backlink profile.

There are tools that do this kind of thing for you (such as Market Samurai, SerpIQ, etc), but it's good to have a solid understanding of what is going on when they're determining how hard or easy it is to rank.

 

[HCPLR]

It's all about what you do for the most part. If it's a smaller niche, it's easier to "take it over". A huge niche would prove much, much more difficult. It's all about what you put in to it, though: SEO, content, if you have the time and resources to make it successful, with the proper knowledge, you can do so.

 

[C.Rebecca]

See, you cannot estimate the difficult level manually...
Profitability is one factor which is to be consider. I have been using 'Keyword Country' to check the profitability of the keywords.

And, number of hits does matter, it gives you a rough idea about the success of the campaign.