The World’s Most Expensive Keywords

The primary function of a keyword is to drive traffic to your site by making your offerings highly visible within search results. These keywords are most cost-effective when they accurately reflect your content and your audience’s habits and search tactics. This is because Google determines the cost per click (CPC) based on a bidding structure that favors some campaigns over others. The bidding process leads to a scarcity in the number of searches on a relative keyword, which then drives up the cost per click. (If you’d like to read about bidding for keywords isn’t the best option for many companies.

Some industries see the prevalence of incredibly expensive keywords. Companies are spending a lot of money to outbid each other and manipulate the bidding process to obtain that coveted top search result. This begins to shine a light on why advertising costs vary significantly and can skyrocket due to the CPC established by Google.

The vast number of keywords available makes it very difficult to quantify the specific list of the world’s most expensive keywords, however; certain industries undeniably require keywords that come at a much higher cost on average than others.

In this piece, we will explore these industries based on CPC, and also provide a list of the most expensive keyword areas.

Legal

The legal industry is extremely competitive, and services in this vertical come at a high price. This results in some of Google’s most expensive CPCs. Keywords at the top of the list include:

This begins to illuminate how highly targeted words and phrases in a popular industry increase the cost per lead (CPL). As firms and businesses with large budgets compete for advertising space, the cost of extremely niche keywords soar.

B2B & IT

IT services are in high demand, and as far as B2B offerings are concerned, this industry is generating some of the priciest keywords available. Spanning from network security to cloud computing and beyond, B2B businesses are paying a lot to generate leads via Google search. The most expensive keywords in IT and B2B include:

B2B and IT keyword selection processes are interesting because potential customers are not only seeking out services, but also an understanding of how the underlying technology works. To realize success here, businesses must have a very strong knowledge of their target market’s thought process, behavior, as well as a roadmap of the buyer’s journey.

Real Estate

Real Estate is another highly competitive industry, leading to expensive keyword bidding wars in major geographic markets around the world. While vague keywords such as “home” or “realtor” generate the highest search volume, more specific long-tail keywords are where the prices begin to increase. The most expensive keywords in real estate include:

The geographic specificity of real estate advertising makes keyword selection extremely important, as businesses want to make sure that they are attracting clicks from customers interested in buying in the cities they are being listed. This is why many of the most expensive keywords in this industry contain location-specific information.

Automotive

Automotive keywords can fall into a few different categories, with the most common being repair and insurance. For the sake of clarity, we want to focus solely on repair, as insurance deserves its category. Within automotive repairs, the priciest keywords tend to revolve around more expensive services. Services such as oil changes and tire replacements aren’t generating the same type of bids. The most expensive keywords in automotive include:

Automotive is another industry that requires geographic information within the keyword, as bidding competition drives these prices up in specific cities. Businesses are spending the most on keywords related to services that generate the highest ROI, and not placing high bids on keywords related to low ticket items.

Insurance

While the insurance industry spans numerous subspecialties, auto insurance keywords tower above all else when it comes to price. Humans are naturally risk-averse, which inspires many to seek options that help avoid catastrophe. This is why, in the U.S., there are over 3.7 million searches for insurance companies every month. The most expensive keywords in insurance include:

Insurance is yet another industry where longtail keywords containing geographic-specific information are generating the most expensive CPC.

Top 10 Most Expensive Keyword Areas

Moving beyond industries that inspire some of the most expensive unique keywords, certain subject areas generate the highest CPCs on average. This list was compiled by combining various searches for related keywords into the same umbrella category. As an example, this means that “lawyer in NYC” was included in the same category as “best accident lawyers near me”. Additionally, keywords with less than 100 clicks were eliminated from the data set, which reduces the number of niche keywords that were made expensive due to Google’s bidding process.  

While keywords carry out their intended function for many businesses that utilize Google search ads, ROI can be challenging to achieve. Many companies pay unreasonable amounts of money and still struggle to compete for a highly ranked search result. In many ways, this can be attributed to the bidding structure established by Google.

Other options are beginning to emerge that offer fixed CPCs for the life of a multi-month campaign. ReverseAds is pioneering these types of fixed CPC solutions. If you’d like to learn how you can reduce the CPC of an ad campaign while increasing ROI, visit https://www.reverseads.com/ or email us at info@reverseads.com to schedule a time to speak with a ReverseAds Data Intelligence Specialist.