Keyword Research

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Keyword research is the most important part of any effort to build a website. If you know what users are looking for, you know what topics to target when you create content or showcase products. Keyword research uncovers this information for you.

(List of tools below)

You should understand that user search trends change over time, so it’s a good idea to refresh your keyword research data on a regular schedule.

Ideally, a keyword research tool should allow easy, quick access to detailed data. Many tools exist today to help you perform this work, and they range from simple online services to products supplied by the engines themselves. You need to understand your needs before you settl eon a tool, as well. Knowing your seasonality (or lack thereof), will help inform the selection of tools. Some tools only show you a 30 day window of data. While this may seem like enough, be warned that unless you track the data manually, you may think seasonal terms have more traffic than they really do. Holiday related searches spike at various times, and a tool only showing the past 30 days of data may be too short a window to truly show you the yearly trend. Bottom line is you could end up thinking there is a lot of traffic on a term, when that traffic only happens once per year.

Other tools show you around one year of data, which is an excellent way to flatten seasonal trends and help you see what a longer period of user data looks like.

As mentioned, some tools are third party, while others are direct form the search engines themselves. These tools offer an excellent way to gain insight via trusted sources, though you should remember that even these tools represent only a snap shot of the true quantity of searches users perform on any given phrase or word.

Every tool should be capable of showing you not only data on exactly what you asked for, but also data on related phrases to the one you inquired about. Your chosen keyword research tool should allow you to export your data so you can manipulate it on your own time.

Finally, it’s important to know that if you use a variety of keyword research tools, you’ll see a variety of results. This is due to the sources of the data, obviously. The key point here is to remember to treat this data as a trend. If you graphed the numbers shown between keyword research tools, the graphs should be roughly the same. You should be focused on the trend, which points to the most searched on phrases, rather than the absolute numbers shown in any tool.

Keyword Research Tool list:

Microsoft Advertising Keyword Research Tool – (It’s an excel plugin – super simple to install and use.)
Yahoo Clues – cool tool from Yahoo
YouTube offers us their tool for researching keywords and phrases
Google’s Keyword Research Tool – be careful with the settings to get best results
Google Insights
Google Trends
SEOBook’s Keyword Tool – requires at least a free account
Keyword Discovery – requires a free account; to see deeper data, you must pay
WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool – requires you to pay to see deeper data
Tag Crowd – cool tool
Keyrow – very cool
Hittail keyword tool – 60 day free trial, paid model after that. Great tool if you are active with managing your content and mapping to targeted keywords.