Highest CPC Keywords and Best Adsense Niches – 2026

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

• Bonus #1: Target these countries if you want to earn 10x more
• Bonus #2: Unlock even more revenue by blocking low CPC ads
  • Pro tip: Run Optimization Experiments
• Bonus #3: Steal your competitor’s lunch (aka. find which keywords are driving the most revenue to them)
• Bonus #4: Find more high paying keywords using Search Console
  • so, how can you make $100 a day with Adsense?
• Tips for Youtube CPC
  • Bottom line
• Updated for May 2026

Bonus #1: Target these countries if you want to earn 10x more

Aiming for the right countries can really skyrocket your adsense earnings. Here are the top 10 countries to target:

No.	Country	Avg. CPC ($)	Max. CPC ($)	Avg. CTR %	Average RPM ($)
1	United States (US)	0.40 – 2.3	>50	2-3	2.04
2	Canada	0.50 – 2	>30	2	1.83
3	United Kingdom (UK)	0.10 – 1.6	>19	1-2	1.37
4	Germany	0.40 – 1	>11	1-3	2.62
5	Thailand	0.30 – 1	6	2	1.6
6	United Arab Emirates (UAE)	0.15 – 3.1	11	4	2.07
7	Japan	0.20 – 0.85	4	3	2.44
8	Switzerland	0.20 – 1	6	3	2.35
9	Italy	0.10 – 0.50	3	1-3	0.73
10	China	0.10-0.30	4	1-2	0.9

If you take a look at this chart, you will notice that most of the countries in this list are first-world countries.

How do you target a particular country in your blog?

The easiest way is to blog in their native language. To get visitors from Canada, US, UK or australia, your blog must be in English. Similarly, write in German if you are looking for people from Deutschland.

You may also change your targeting settings under Search Console.

Bonus #2: Unlock even more revenue by blocking low CPC ads

As a publisher, you have a good amount of control as to which Ad Categories you want to show on your site.

If you are trying to raise the CPC, RPM or CPM of your Adsense ads, then I suggest you take a look at your ad performance and start blocking categories that are not paying well.

Here’s how you can do that.

1. Go to Adsense and on the left hand column click on “Blocking Controls > Content> All Sites”
2. Click on “General Categories”
3. Sort by % Earnings (Ascending).
4. In there you can take a look at which ads are taking a good amount of impressions but generating relatively low earnings.
   • For instance, let’s say the “Hobbies Games & Leisure” category is taking 4% of impressions yet just making 0.7% of your revenue, you can try and block it, and see if your performance improves.

You may also experiment by blocking certain ad networks. I haven’t personally tried this, but some people claim it works.

A word of caution: Don’t block too many categories (or ad networks) or else you will significantly reduce the bid competition and will start driving your revenue down.

Pro tip: Run Optimization Experiments

You can always run an Experiment (found under Optimization > Experiments) and see if blocking your ads yields more revenue or not.

You can also test if showing 50% of your total ads vs. 100% of ads yields more revenue.

Google Adsense experiments typically last for 10-30 days, up to 100 days (depending on your experiment and traffic).

For instance, I am running the experiment of blocking certain categories, and as you can see below I already started to see some good results (unfortunately Adsense policies prevent me from sharing the exact numbers).

Bonus #3: Steal your competitor’s lunch (aka. find which keywords are driving the most revenue to them)

What if you could view which keywords gets your competition the most clicks and revenue?

I’ll show you how I do it.

The process is very simple and uses SEMRush. (7 day free trial)

All you have to do is:

1. Find any authority site in your niche. (For the sake of example in online marketing, I will use my own site)
2. Type that site on the search bar in SEMRush
3. Scroll to “Top Organic Keywords” and click on “See Full Report”
4. On that report, sort by CPC.
5. Voilá, you have a list of potential keywords that you can now use.
6. Rinse and repeat with other sites that you admire.

Once you do this process with 3-5 sites, you will have a good set of keywords that you can target. (By the way, you can hire someone on Fiverr or Freeeup to write quality articles for you so you don’t have to actually spend time doing it.) 

Bonus #4: 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.

1. Install the Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

2. Head to the Search Analytics under the Google Webmasters Tools

3. Choose your website

4. Be sure to check the Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position boxes at the top

   

5. Filter by any specific page that you want keywords to show for: i.e. https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/

6. Since you installed the Keywords Everywhere tool you will see an additional 3 columns on your list, namely: Monthly Volume, CPC and Competition

   

7. 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.

8. I made a Google sheet for you that you can copy (File > Make a Copy..) to sort all your keywords.

9. Copy and paste all your keywords, and then hit the arrow on the column of CPC and **sort from Z->A
   **

   

10. 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.)

Related: Remember you can also show ads on Youtube (here’s a fun guide to Youtube SEO). 

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.

Here are more Youtube SEO tips.

Bottom line

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.

I put a lot of work into it so I’d appreciate it if you tweet it out. Also let me know what you want me to write about next! If you want you can hit me up on Snapchat @youngslacker or Instagram: @youngslacker. 

Read also:

1. My KILLER on-page SEO techniques
2. How to get to #1 on Google and why you haven’t yet 
3. Who is Alejandro Rioja?
4. What the heck is RankBrain and why haven’t I heard about it before?

At this point, aren’t you wondering how I got the first result on Google for this blog post? Read here to find out how.

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This guide is part of alejandrorioja.com — written by Alejandro Rioja, who now builds AI agent systems for founders. Including the agent that keeps this site current. How it works →

Updated for May 2026

Google’s 2026 story is AI Overviews everywhere: the SGE experiment from 2023 graduated to a default feature in May 2024 and now appears on an estimated ~60% of US informational queries. For SEO and ad operators:

• Organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews has dropped 15–30% on average per published studies from Ahrefs, Authoritas, and similar (2024–25 data).
• Google Ads rebranded several PMax features as AI-powered Search; the campaign management UI now defaults to AI bidding suggestions.
• Search Console added an “AI Overview impressions” filter in late 2025 — if a post here references GSC reporting, the playbook needs a refresh.
• Google’s ad revenue crossed ~$265B in 2024; Search remains ~57% of total Alphabet revenue.

The “how Google makes money” answer in 2026: still Search ads (dominant), but YouTube ads, Cloud, and Subscriptions (YouTube Premium + Google One) are all material lines now.