Now go to Google Keywords Tool and input the keywords you've thought up to see if you were accurate with the keywords that you've imagined your customers would search for. If you are targeting locally, set up the location and language for the keyword search.
Also input the keywords you've collected from competitors in the Competitor Research stage.
Google Keywords Tool will show you all the valuable informtion for your keywords
At this point, you will see how popular or how unpopular each keyword is by seeing how many searches are done on each keyword per month. Under the competition tab, you can also see the amount of advertiser competition for a given keyword. Note that the competition shown here is not about the competition on SEO. We want to find out about the competition in terms of how many websites or webpages out on the internet are also targeting the same keywords we are targeting, and not in terms of advertising.
So, what's next is that you will have to check the competition on each of the keywords in terms of SEO to see how difficult it is to rank organically for the keyword - meaning that Google shows our website's link to users even when we're not paying money to advertise on those keywords. Below we will give you an accurate way to analyze competition. It's also better that you start with long tail keywords, since those are more specific - thus less competition.
Other than competition and a bunch of other information, you can also find some other awesome keyword suggestions that you can use under the "Keyword Ideas" tab.
So, by using Google Keywords Tool, you will find out whether the keywords you've chosen are popular. However, what you need to find keywords that are popular, but are not competed heavily on. If the keywords you've found are not popular or if the competition is too high, revise your keywords list and do the search again.
Case Study: Some successful businesses like Mint had their primary customer acquisition channel as their blog, which they scripted their headlines and content based on the most popular keywords their customers search for. They had a seperate article for every single targeted keyword phrase.
Once you've taken down the list of your keywords you want to research on, this is how you find out exactly how much competition there is for a certain keywords, and see if you can actually rank for it.
How to find out about competition:
#1. Allintitle:, Allinanchor:, and AllinURL:
1. Allintitle: Go to google, and use the operator allintitle: keyword - to search for your keywords. Example: allintitle: start a startup. You will then see all the pages that have "start a startup" in the title, which means they are also directly targeting those keywords. It's better if the resulting number is less than 5000.
2. Allinanchor: You can also use allinanchor: keyword - to to see how many links are on the internet with the keywords as the link text. The results that you see are the people who are directly competing with you for the keywords, because they are even using those keywords for their links (the text for this link is the anchor text - the anchor text is "this link"). If the results is under 5000, then you would have a better chance of ranking for it.
3. Allinurl: The 3rd search is searching for all the webpages that have the keywords in their URL address as well (e.g. www.startitup.com/keywords-keywords-keywords). As mentioned, the results should be under 5000.
#2. Install a plugin called SEO for Chrome and that tool will help you see the page rank of any web page. Page Rank is the rank (the higher the better) that Google gives to a web page to see how trust worthy the page is and is a reflection of the strength of a site's backlinks - meaning the amount of link juice that a link is able to contribute.
#3. Google your keyword, and then open up the top 5 results. Use "SEO for Chrome" and look at the PR (page rank) of the top 5 pages. If they are too high, like more than a 5, then the websites would be too trustworthy for you to beat.
#4. You can also check the domain age of the top 5 results. The older the domain is, the better it will rank in Google.
The combination of the indicators above will tell you whether or not you will be able to rank for your keywords organically by Google.
You can learn some details of SEO here:
http://www.affilorama.com/market-research/evaluating-competition-in-seo
See these pages for some useful tips:
http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/content-marketing-tips/
Tools you can use to check website ranking and other information:
