Keyword & Customer Research:

Before starting your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign or PPC for that matter, it's important to find out what your potential customers are searching for.

The Keyword Discovery search term suggestion tool offers the most current and reliable keyword data with historical trends. This is the tool that is used by industry experts and covers many regional keyword databases such as UK, French, Dutch, German, Spanish etc... There is a free trial and a paid option that provides access to more features.

Yahoo! Search Marketing also offers a free keyword suggestion tool (Overture Keyword Selector Tool). This is an extremely useful service since it will tell exactly how many people have searched for a specific term the previous month. Unfortunately, this service is no longer updated on a monthly bases and has been known to be down for weeks at a time. It's important to remember that this search data is based on the searches coming through Yahoo! and should therefore be multiplied with 3.5 to get an approximate number of the total volume of searches including Google and MSN.

Google offers a similar tool but there no search volume provided here. Another good tool is Wordtracker. However, this service requires a license which costs and the search data provided is US biased.

In summary, use as many keyword tools as you can but if we had a choice to use only one tool it would be Keyword Discovery.

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