Keyword research is one of the most important steps for good SEO of your site. First let’s start with understanding what keyword research is. Essentially keyword research is understanding which keywords you want to target (for each page in your site) and which search terms you want to be found for on search engines.For example if you are a php consultant in California you probably want to be found for the terms ‘php consultant’ and ‘php consultant California’.
So why use a keyword research tool in the first place? A keyword research tool will give you more information about the words you want to target and also ideas of which words you could target. So assuming you are a php consultant then the keyword tool will tell you how many times people search for the keyword you want to be found for. For example the term ‘php consultant’ gets 590 searches a month approximately. This way you don’t target terms which have very low search volumes.
Typically comparing numbers between keyword research tools is similar to comparing numbers between different analytics tools. There will always be a frustrating difference. When comparing different keyword tools, there is usually a minimum difference between numbers in the range of 10-30%.
For example, lets compare numbers for the keyword ‘buy domain‘ in three of the most popular keyword tools:
1. Google Search Based Keyword Tool shows monthly volume as 8200
2. Google Adwords External Keyword Tool shows a 6600 monthly volume for the same keyword.
3. Keyword Spy shows a monthly search volume of 135,000! This huge difference is probably because they are showing ‘broad search’ numbers as opposed to the exact search numbers.
So what should you do? Here are my recommendations:
