How Many Channel Keywords Should a YouTube Channel Have?
A Calgary contractor asked me last year how many keywords he should pack into his YouTube channel settings. He had read somewhere that more was better and wanted to know if forty was too few. Channel keywords are the descriptive terms you enter at the account level in YouTube Studio to tell the platform what kind of content your whole channel covers. The honest answer surprised him. Five to ten is plenty. I have run SEO Company To-The-TOP! on my own since 2007, and the urge to cram every field with terms is the same mistake I see on business websites every week.
Here is the short version before the detail. The field holds up to 500 characters, though the number worth using sits closer to five or ten focused terms, roughly 50 to 75 characters in total. Quality beats volume. Stuffing the box with loosely related words dilutes the signal instead of strengthening it. Most of the Calgary SEO thinking that applies to a website applies to a YouTube channel just as well.
How to Create SEO Friendly URLs
URLs. Google reads them before anything else on a page. Title tag comes later. Same with the H1. The address in the browser bar. Most sites underinvest there. Long URL slugs packed with stop words. Dynamic parameters with session IDs baked in. Date strings that lock otherwise evergreen content in a specific year. None of these problems are catastrophic alone. Together they signal to search engines that the site has not thought through how crawlers navigate.
Six rules cover 90% of the URL structure issues that come up in audits. Apply them from the start and they never need fixing later.
How Much Does It Cost to Buy Keywords on Google?
Google does not sell keywords at a fixed price. You pay for each click your ad receives, and that price is set in an auction every time someone searches, so the cost of buying keywords on Google depends on your industry, your location and the quality of your ads. Published benchmarks still give a useful reference point. LocaliQ’s 2026 search advertising benchmarks, built with WordStream from thousands of customer campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, put the average cost per click across all industries at $5.42, with industry averages from $1.63 in arts and entertainment to $9.87 in legal. LocaliQ does not state a currency, although figures from an American company’s customer campaigns are most likely US dollars. One analysis of commercial keywords reports far higher figures for some industries, so there is no universal figure, and the most useful thing this guide offers is how to estimate the likely cost of your own keywords before you spend anything.
Why You Cannot Actually Buy a Keyword on Google
Keywords are not for sale on Google, and nobody can own one. Advertisers may generally bid on the same keywords, including trademarked terms such as your business name, subject to Google Ads policies. What you pay for is a click: your ad can show when a search matches your keyword, and Google charges you only when that person clicks through. Because Google runs a fresh auction for every search (the guide to how Google Ads work walks through it), the same keyword’s price can change from one search to the next.
What Is the Keyword Opportunity Score?
The Definition Takes Two Sentences
A keyword opportunity score is one number. A tool builds it from other numbers it already holds. Search volume goes in. So does some reading of how hard the results look. Often a guess at how many clicks the page hands out. Then a figure comes back. High means chase it. Low means leave it.
Different SEO tools build it differently. Some publish their method. Others do not.
What Is Dwell Time in SEO?
Dwell time measures how long a visitor stays on a page after clicking a search result, then returns to the results page. Ten seconds signals a poor match. Four minutes signals the opposite. Google has never confirmed it as a direct ranking input. The behaviour it captures still shapes how a page performs over time.
SEO Company To-The-TOP! gets asked about this metric constantly by Calgary business owners chasing every possible ranking signal. The real answer sits somewhere between “it matters” and “stop obsessing over it.” Both halves matter here.
What Is Google Indexing in SEO?
We have worked with clients in Calgary since 2007. One question comes up on almost every first call. Why isn’t my page showing up on Google? Nine times out of ten, the answer is indexing. Not rankings. Keywords either. The answer is indexing.
A page that is not indexed does not exist in Google’s search results. It can be well-written. Load quickly. Cover the right topics. None of that matters until Google has indexed it.
How to Optimize Content for AI Search Engines
Search Console data from client accounts in 2025 tells a clearer story than any trend report. Impressions climbing on conversational queries. Click-through rates dropping on head terms. Branded searches arriving from AI-referred visitors who encountered a site weeks before they finally searched by name. The traffic pattern has changed.
SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing the local SEO Calgary businesses rely on since 2007. Nineteen years in. No shift moved faster than what happened between 2024 and 2025. Here is the practical account of what changed and why.
How Much Can You Make from Google Ads? It Depends Which Side You Are On
How much you can make from Google Ads depends on which side of the system you are on. If you show Google’s ads on a website through AdSense, Google says publishers receive 80% of the ad revenue after the advertiser’s platform takes its fee, which works out to about 68% of what the advertiser paid when the ad was bought through Google Ads. YouTube partners who turn on watch page ads receive 55% of the net revenue from those ads, and 45% of the Shorts ad revenue allocated to them by their share of views. If you buy Google Ads for a business, there is no fixed figure at all: you make what each sale earns you, minus what the clicks cost to get it.
Both readings of the question are common, and they lead to very different answers. The first half of this article covers publishers, meaning website owners, YouTube creators and app developers who are paid to show ads. The second half covers advertisers who pay Google for clicks and want to know what return to expect.
If you show Google’s ads on a website (AdSense)
How to Pause Google Ads, Stop a Campaign or Cancel Your Account
To pause Google Ads, sign in at ads.google.com, open Campaigns in the Campaigns menu, select the coloured status dot next to the campaign and choose Pause. Google says a paused campaign stops showing ads, stops accruing new charges and keeps all of its settings and history, so you can turn it back on later with Enable. To pause several campaigns at once, tick their checkboxes, open Edit and choose Pause. That covers most people who search for how to stop Google Ads, because a pause is the only option that is fully reversible. Removing a campaign and cancelling the account are bigger steps with consequences that are easy to miss, and both are covered further down, along with what you will still be billed for after the ads stop.
How to Check Keyword Difficulty
During our Calgary SEO work, a client once asked me why a keyword his competitor ranked for kept refusing to budge for his own site. Same phrase. Comparable effort, near enough. The answer was sitting in a number neither of us had bothered to read first. Keyword difficulty. It tells you, before you write a word, how hard it will be to crack the first page for a given term.
So this is the practical version. How to check keyword difficulty, what the score actually means, and why the same number can be a green light for one site and a brick wall for another. I have been doing this since 2007, and I still run this check on every term before those keywords go anywhere near a content plan.