This blog entry picks up where our last one left off, providing more explanations and links to useful tools for generating keyword ideas. Topics discussed include keyword forecasting, estimating search volume, building keyword lists, and user intent.

Keyword Forecasting: We’re frequently asked by our clients to break out our crystal ball and predict/forecast the future performance of potential keywords. Below is a list of tools we use here to perform such a task:

Your keywords' future performance will be....

1. Google Trends:  Allows you to enter up to five topics/keywords and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. It also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This an excellent tool to see the seasonality of specific keywords.

2. Google Insights : I hate to use this comparison again but Google Insights is Google Trends on steroids. Insights lets you do all the same things that trends does with additional segmentation. You can now look at and compare search trends across specific regions, categories (apparel, automotive, etc), and demographics.

3. Google Traffic Estimator: Provides traffic and cost estimates on new keywords. It’s show estimates based on positions 1-3. It will show the high and low end of estimated clicks per day, average CPC, estimated cost per day. It will also show you traffic estimates for keywords based on country as well as match type.

Estimating Search Volumes: Once you drafted a good list of keyword ideas the next piece of the puzzle is finding out which of these combination’s drives the most volume per search query.  Below are a few tools that we use:

How much traffic can we get?

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool: This tool could really fall under two other categories we mentioned before keyword ideas & keyword forecasting.  Similar to the traffic estimator it provides traffic estimates however it uses the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network in the previous calendar month. In addition to the volumes it will show keywords related to the term in question.  Unlike the traffic estimator it does not show you an estimated cost of the target keyword.

2. Word Tracker: You can use WT like Google’s keyword tool, to identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. We like this tool because it  is provided by a 3rd party and is not directly affiliated with any particular SE. It’s a great resource to cross reference results you are getting from other applications.

Building Keyword Lists: If you’ve ever been tasked with drafting a keyword list for your client or business you know that it can be a very time consuming task to construct a comprehensive list. Below is a list of tools we’ve found that will help you expedite the process:

Let's get these keywords compiled!

1. Keyword Geo Targeting & Wrapper Tool:  If you are developing a keyword list for specific geographic areas this tool will be a God Send for you. This tool will generate every possible keyword combination for a given geographic area using the target keyword, the zip code in question, and the radius (in miles) from which you want to target the keyword.

2. SEO Book List Generator: If you’ve never mastered the art of concatenating in Excel then you need not worry. This tool, by Aaron Wall of SEOBook, takes all the heavy lifting off your hands.

User Intent: Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know a user’s intent when searching? Well it appears some providers are getting close to answering this for us.

1. Online Commercial Intention: MSN is the first to break ground on what will be the next frontier—understanding user intent.  They break down search into two simple segments, those who are looking for information and those who are looking to purchase. This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs.

Well that’s all we’ve got today. Leave a comment and let us know what you are using!

Rise Interactive is a Chicago-based Internet marketing agency specializing in maximizing ROI for paid search and search engine optimization clients.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Paid Search (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.