Like any skilled trade, Keyword Research has it’s own set of tools to get the job done.  Some are free and some are paid however the free tools that are available will provide you with PLENTY of information to get up and running.

In fact, our friends at Google, the very big machine that we are trying to beat, provides us with all the information were going to need, and it’s FREE!

The main tool to get acquainted with is the “Google Adwords Keyword Tool” and you can find it by using this url: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The first step to take is to type in your main keyword in the box in the middle of the page.  Although you will want to go back and do this multiple times with different keywords, it’s good to start out with a more general term at first.  This is because the keyword tool will give you many different variations and other phrases that you might not have thought of that are relative to your niche.

After you hit the “Get keyword ideas” button, you will then see all the keywords that the tool finds along with information on search volume, advertiser competition and estimated cost per click. It’s important to note here that one of the main reasons this tool was created was for people who advertise with the Google Adwords system.  Although it’s a good thing to use, we are not going to talk about it in this article.

The main data that we want from this tool is the Search Volume numbers. You have two results to look at, Local Volume and Global Volume. To keep things simple, take the two numbers and average them out, this will give you a basic idea of how many people typed that term into Google in any given month.

Before you get the overwhelming feeling of data overload and the intimidating feeling of “what do I do with all this information”, take a step back and relax.  The next step to take is to save all this info so that we can analyze it in the future.  At the bottom of all the results, you have the ability to download the list of keywords into an excel document.  This is a great feature and will allow us to use Excel to keep our information organized.

Now what you should do is go through your list of phrases that you created earlier and get results for each term.  Yes you are going to have a lot of keywords to look at but don’t feel overwhelmed.  First of all there are going to be a lot of duplicate phrases because all our terms are going to be relative to eachother so it’s a good idea to go through and delete any duplicates.

To keep things focused, just go through your list and collect data. In the next article we will talk about how to analyze the data and find our golden keywords that we want to target.

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