I don’t know about you but I have always been obsessed about finding THE keyword research tool that would make it possible to do proper keyword research without having to jump on to other kw tools. I know a lot of SEOs talk about how WordTracker and Keyword Discovery are amazing tools that one should live without, but there is no question that Google has put a lot of work into making their own keyword tool one of the best in the industry.

I don’t question the merits of tools such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, or even Wordze, but I firmly believe that the days of most people starting keyword research from scratch are truly over. It’s just not efficient enough to start your keyword process from scratch. If you are planning to enter a market that has 3 or more big players in it, you already have all you need to find your keyword list. These folks have put their time and effort to build up their site over the years, and one would be stupid to not use the efforts these guys have put in to create a comprehensive keyword list.

That’s where my favorite tool comes in. SpyFu has truly be a revelation for my business in the past few months. I admit that I never wanted to give SpyFu a chance. I thought it was a cool tool but overrated at best. But what I didn’t know was I was overestimating other tools and severely underestimating SpyFu’s capabilities.

The ability to look at a big player in your industry, and see all the keywords that they are ranking for effectively ends the need to start your keyword research from scratch. With tools such as SpyFu you can see what keywords you are ranking for, what keywords your competitors are ranking for, and where the gap is.

I am always about getting things done faster, and with SpyFu you can get things done faster than any tool available on the market. The tool is the not 100% perfect, which is why you should use Google Adwords tool to fill in the gaps. Who says keyword research has to be hard and time-consuming when you can outsource it to your competitors…

So let’s have a pop quiz here. What’s the most important part of any search engine optimization initiative? Bingo! It’s keyword research. Before you write any title tags or any META descriptions, you should do your keyword research. So what do I mean by keyword research? It means finding the right keywords that are right for your business goals. For instance, if you are a financial institution, you have a better chance of attracting and converting your visitors if you are targeting the right keywords. If your top keyword is “yogurt” then you probably will see a high bounce rate on your homepage or landing page. People who search for a rare kind of yogurt don’t come to your site to read your financial analysis, and you have probably 15 seconds to make that first impression, which you won’t with your finance-themed website.

But how do you know you have right keyword? You need to figure out what your business goals are? Are you trying to get more eyeballs to your site or do you want to convert more? That’s where super-crunchers come in. You can use your analytics team (in case you have that) to work with you to find the keywords that attract the most traffic and convert the best. But before doing that, you need to have an ultimate list of keywords that you will be choosing your main keywords from. There are two ways to do that. One way is to use tools such as Yahoo! Keywords tool (actually this is not really working anymore) and other free keywords tool and give your best shot at finding the best draft list for your business. Another way to do this is to use a professional keyword research tool such as WordTracker if you actually afford it (not that it’s expensive).
WordTracker allows you to do some serious keyword analysis by allowing you to compare search estimates for keywords and even compare their KEIs. This is particularly useful if you are trying to find keywords that are right for your business but necessarily so competitive that you can’t get ranked for. Imagine the term “books.” Now whoever says ranking for that term is easy is probably drinking something. But with the right tool such as WordTracker, you can make sure what you are going for before it’s too late. Don’t get me wrong. These short term keywords would make sense for some company such as Amazon, but not for a blog or small business at it would be really costly to get ranked for them.

The forecasting tool within Wordtracker is very powerful, while not completely accurate. You can find out if the keywords that you have chosen are likely to bomb in the next month or actually do some damage. But the best part of Wordtracker is the “dig” feature. You can find cool niches to target for your blog with this feature. As WordTracker describes it, digging is the process of moving to the next level in your keyword research to get more specific terms. For instance, digging the word waterboarding will allow you to find more specific terms such as “waterboarding torture” and see how competitive these terms are.

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