Keyword Search Popularity

Selecting the right keywords for your website can often be a difficult process unless you have access to tools that provide keyword search popularity statistics. Having data on how often a keyword phrase is searched in the search engines provides the information to understand whether the search term is worth pursuing.

There are multiple internet marketing tools available that provide this information, both in free and paid options. As with anything else, you get what you pay for and while the free tools provide good high level information, they do not provide the ability to drill down and get the detailed data to make really good, informed decisions.

For free products, it is really difficult to beat the Google Keywords Tool. This utility is very useful for generating large lists of related keywords very quickly. You start with a seed keyword (or keywords) and the Google keyword tool will return up to 800 related keywords. Along with the related keywords, it provides useful information about the keywords, including:

• Competition – a high/medium/low description for the number of websites that have this keyword term mentioned on their website
• Global monthly searches – the 12-month average for global searches in Google for keyword match type you select (broad, phrase, exact)
• Local monthly searches – the 12-month average for country-specific searches in Google for keyword match type you select (broad, phrase, exact)
• Cost per click – the approximation of what it would cost to get first level position in the paid searches
• Local search trends – monthly, graphical representation of the keyword search popularity of the specific keyword term
• Other relevant search phrase popularity data

This data is very helpful when doing initial keyword research for the keyword phrases that you are considering. The problem with the Google keyword tool though is that it a) does not provide any additional information than what is listed, b) provides no way to drill down further into the keywords that it returns, and c) does not provide any real analysis tools to compare possible ‘good’ keywords. In other words, how does ‘good keyword a’ stack up against good keywords b, c, d, e, f, etc.

And that brings us to our favorite product that we use for keyword search popularity research – Market Samurai, which we believe is the best SEO keywords tool available on the internet. Market Samurai provides the same information as listed above for the Google keyword tool, but does it in much more detail and in a better presentation layer that we believe makes it much more useful.

The following are the key benefits that we believe make Market Samurai the best:

• It pulls search data directly from Google, which is fresh and up-to-date at the time of the search
• There are many options to select for viewing the data – daily, weekly or monthly totals; broad, phrase or match searches; pre-defined filters that you can modify; and much more
• The data is presented in a tabular form similar to an Excel spreadsheet which is very user friendly
• The data can be sorted, you can exclude certain keywords, you can include only certain keywords, etc. – in other words, you can view the data just about anyway possible
• Market Samurai provides detailed keyword data that is useful in both SEO and pay per click campaigns

And that is just the keyword tool part of Market Samurai. Beyond being the best keyword search popularity tool, this product provides other exception functionality:

• SEO Competition – at a glimpse you can get detailed information about the websites that hold the top 10 positions for any specific keyword and decide if this keyword search term is worth pursuing
• Backlinks / anchor text tracking – a very useful feature to track where your backlinks are coming from and what anchor text is being used in the link
• Rank tracker – allows you to track the search engine ranking positions for your targeted keywords
• … and much more

Selecting the right tool is really a personal choice, but we believe that Market Samurai provides a lot of value for their relatively low price ($147). Since keywords are so important to the success of your SEO project, making a minor investment into a solid, robust keyword search popularity tool is good for the success of your business.

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