A keyword research tool can make or break all of your search engine optimization efforts. That said, it can be a little nerve racking pulling out your credit card to fork over the money they are asking for these tools. Though your keyword research can be done manually, it will be incredibly time consuming and leave lots of room for errors. Your best bet is to take the time to find a good keyword research software and then double check the information it gives you to make sure it is accurate.
So why are keyword research tools so important?
As mentioned earlier, they can literally make or break you. This means emotionally and financially. The last thing you want to do is enter into niche only to find that you cannot rank at all after hundreds of hours of work and hundreds of dollars invested. This of course being the biggest fear of any internet marketer.
Here's a small list of tasks a good keyword research tool can do for you.
Generate and find large amounts of keywords related to your niche. This can help you discover keywords your competitors may have missed, including misspellings and transposed words.
Show you how many websites mention an exact keyword phrase helping you determine just how many websites you are going up against.
Show you how many back links a domain has.
Show you how many back links a specific web page has.
Give you the domain age of each domain ranking for specific keyword phrase in one snap shot helping you determine quickly how tough the competition will be.
Give you an idea of how much traffic you would receive from search engines if you ranked #1 for a specific keyword phrase.
Show you all anchor texts linking to a specific domain or web page. This can be very useful in helping you find out just how relevant their anchor text is.
Help you find domains with a specific keyword phrase cutting out hours of work searching for a relevant domain name.
Help you analyze on page SEO of your competitors including keywords in H tags, title tags, and meta descriptions.
Help you analyze off page SEO of your competitors by checking if they are listed in the DMOZ and yahoo web directory.