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Mike...

I think it is important to warn people that these tools are not cast in tablets of stone.

Originally Posted by Mike Seddon

I thought I'd post up the keyword tools I tend to use in case they are of interest to anyone.

First up is Wordtracker. It's the only paid for keyword tool I've seen that I'd recommend. I put together a video of how it works here:

Wordtracker Video

Second, I suggest using Google's own tool:

Google Keyword Tool

Third, I use Aaron Wall's Keyword Tool:

SEOBook Keyword Tool

Enjoy hunting for your keywords.

Cheers
Mike

BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THEM

At best they are only an indication = At worst they are TOTALLY WRONG!

And what is worse is , the error can be 10 times wrong
in either direction, I see both regularlly with wordtracker.

- there are too many assumption, and far too little evidence built in to all of them

-the SEO book assumptions on ratios between traffic,between search engines are so general that they rarely give useful information - and NEVER when the term has any local influence, since the search engines are not homogeneous demographically

- wordtracker gets information from minor sources and tries to multiply by big numbers to guess at the bigger picture.

My suggestion is , that you use Google Trends to calibrate all traffic.

For example, wordtracker says that "liverpool" gets twice as much traffic as "manchester"
Not surprising when you realise there is a manchester in the states too.

Go to www.google.co.uk/trends
enter liverpool, manchester as the search string and you will see that
manchester gets MORE traffic than liverpool!

It gets worse:

Compare "liverpool football club" with "liverpool fc" - wordtracker says that google traffic is similar, google says the two are a factor of more than 10 different

Even googles own adwords engine screws up... when common prepositions are involved

For a period I was bidding on the american franchise name "assist to sell" as a back door way into the real estate market

Adwords said there was very little traffic - the word "to" is why it screws up

Google trends said there was a huge volume. Google trends was right!!!

I was getting several thousands of very cheap clicks per day for a real estate product...which is a nother reason to say to people

TAKE OF THE BLINKERS WHEN USING ADWORDS AND START TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!!
- there is often more traffic to backdoor words than the main market keywords.
and who else looks up an property franchise website, than someone interested in buying houses?

The other reason for using google trends... is it tells you demographically - and geo targetting is always valuable. eg INternet marketing is FAR less COMPETITIVE and FAR higher demand in MALAYSIA than here....

So act accordingly

So the moral of the story is

If you want to know how much traffic there is on google, ask google!!!

AND

If you want a heap of videos on how to do what I have said - and a superb FREE TOOL to do this...

Sign up for www.thirtydaychallenge.com FREE!!! - Dan raine and Rob Somerville are seriously clever marketers
I owe it to Ed Dale, whose site it is, to force you to sign up to find out.

the drawback??

As ALVIN pointed out to me when I told him about this,,, it gets inaccurate on long tail expressions that only have a few tens of clicks per day.

[Alvin]

Too true I believe there are certain commercial elements at work in some traffic software figures especially surounding adwords.


It is of course in there interests to inflate the amount of traffic for a given key word.

One of my favourites is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

But I use this in conjuction with at least 2 other forms of keyword tracking.

Alvin

[Alex Upstream]

When working with these tools, it is important to use common sense and experience too.

I like the SEO Book tool, but find the figures far too inconsistent to present to clients. This is especially true of UK clients who are not looking to sell in the States. The overseas version of the tool rarely seems to provide any results at all!

I agree that Google Trends is a great way of estimating search volumes, but you need a decent yardstick to judge by. This is, of course, easier when you have a wider base of website stats to work with (ie an agency, with clients across a spread of industries).

[Jon Hills]

thanks for the help bud