Free Keyword Research Tools - Wordtracker GTrends

There are only a handful of decent free keyword research tools out there and the Wordtracker GTrends keyword research tool is one of them. Anyone familiar with basic internet marketing techniques will understand the importance of keyword research. In a nutshell the tool provides the following information.

• A list of long tails for your main keyword,
• The approximate search volume, and
  
• The number of competing pages in Google

To use the tool, go the the following url: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

You will be presented with the following screen.


To use the GTrends tool, simply enter your main keyword in the text box labeled Keyword and click on Hit Me. You will notice that there is an Adult Filter drop down list which you can use to filter the results the tool returns. Normally I just leave it at the default of remove offensive, but depending on your niche you may want to play around with this.

If I type in the keyword financial freedom and click 'Hit Me', I will get results similar to those shown below. The free version of this tool which we're using will only show the first 100 results (if there are that many) but that's plenty for when you're just starting out. Once you start making money with your website, then you might like to upgrade to the paid version, but the free one will do us for now.


In the results you can see the search term along with the average daily searches and a little clickable picture of a graph or bar chart. The search terms returned in the results all contain the keyword which you entered. These are all of the long tail variations that people are actually searching for. The average daily searches is just that - it's Wordtacker's estimate of how many people search for that term each day.

At this point, we can do one of two things. We can either drill down on a particular search term to see all of it's long tail variations in the same way we just did for financial freedom, or we can click on the little graph icon. Lets click on the graph to see what that does.



What we see here is the Niche Summary for the keyword financial freedom. It shows us 2 main things:

1. The competition in Google, and
2. The actual visitors per day in Google.

The competition in Google is simply the number of search results returned for a search on financial freedom in Google. Theoretically, the less pages, the lower the competition and therefore the easier it will be to rank for the term. However, I believe this logic to be flawed and I'll explain why soon.

The Actual Visitors is the theoretically the number of visitors a number one ranking in Google would get you for this search term. The tools calculates this information based on the Google Trends data and being Google data, it should be more accurate than the Wordtracker data.

You may notice that in parentheses under the competition and visitor figures, the tool recommends certain numbers - less than 30,000 competition and greater than 100 daily visitors. This is based on the methodology used by the creator of the tool to make money online. The theory is that less than 30,000 results should be fairly easy to rank for and more than 100 visitors per day should be enough for you to start earning some money.

While in principal this approach is okay, particularly if you're just starting out, the reality is a little more complex. The difficulty with placing a limit of 30,000 (or any other number) on the competition is that it doesn't take into account the strength of the sites which show up on the first page of the search results. There may only be 10,000 results, but the top 10 sites might be very strong - well established sites with lots of authority for the term you're chasing.

Alternatively, there may be 500,000 competing pages, but the top 10 may only mention the term in passing. It might be wide open to someone coming in with some fresh, well targeted content.

So while these number are a good starting point, make sure you look into who you'll actually be competing with as well.

At the bottom of the Niche Summary you will see some links to allow you to do some further research.
- You can navigate to the actual results in Google, or
- You can search for affiliate programs in the niche - this is how you'll be making your money, or
- You can go to the Google Trends site to look at the search volume and history in more detail.

The other interesting thing you'll find on the Wordtracker GTrends page is a thesaurus. Think of it as lateral keyword research - branching out to other closely related niches.

I'll leave you with one final thing to remember about keyword research. The Wordtracker GTrends tool, as with most other free keyword research tools will only provide estimates. Use your own common sense as well. If the keyword 'financial freedom in the arctic' happened to show 1,000 daily searches, you can be fairly sure that something is not right. These tools aren't perfect.