Starting a Business | SEO & Google
Online SEO Tools
Research is critical to any business - what are your competitors doing? What is the market doing? Dust off that magnifying glass, start wearing tweed and let's find out.
Overture offer their keyword checker, but what else can you use to find out more? Well, there are a selection of sites offering businesscritical information about keywords; some you pay for, some you don't. I'm going to concentrate on the free information - because it's strong, accurate and if you are happy to invest the time, why pay someone else?
We might think we know what keywords people often use, and we might think we know how many competitors are out there, but Wordtracker will be able to tell you categorically if that is the case. Go to the site and enter the keywords or phrases you are interested in. The great thing about Wordtracker is that it will also show you how many users searched for that word today, what the competition is like for your selected keyword or phrase - and give the results a numerical score, known as a KEI, so you will instantly know whether you are one of few or one of many competing for a keyword. If you're lucky there will be some words or phrases with a KEI of more than 300, which means it is a popular keyword with very little competition; any score of more than 50 is well worth optimising. You should focus your marketing attention on these words.
A really handy tool, and again it's free. Nichebot takes its data from both Yahoo!/Overture and from Wordtracker; it then merges the information and displays the results accordingly. Nichebot uses its own algorithm to display the data, and a good score on Nichebot is a very low number as opposed to the higher the better with Wordtracker.
I think Nichebot is handy if you're short on time, but I've noticed discrepancies between the data provided on Nichebot and the same data you can get from their sources (Yahoo/Wordtracker). Therefore I would run the tests separately if time allowed.
Here's an idea for you
Don't just add these web addresses to your favourites or promise yourself that you'll take a look in a few days - do it, right now. This data is only accurate up to the date of the search. A single look at the data won't allow for peaks and troughs. What you need to be doing is collecting and collating this information, and you should continue to do so over the coming weeks. Create a spreadsheet with the most important keywords and the associated number of searches - are there patterns, trends or fluctuations that might have an impact on your business over a twelve-month period?
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