Newcomers to internet marketing are always told they should do keyword research before
they choose their niche to market to but many don't know how to do that or which keyword selection tool to use.
There are plenty of choices out there; you can use a free keyword selection tool or one that you pay for once only or one that you have to pay a monthly fee for. This sounds like a no brainer but most of the paid tools offer much more than just keyword research.
If you use Google's free Adwords keyword selection tool, you can make the following search choices:
1a. List keywords or phrases, one per line in the box provided and/or
1b. Type in a website url to see which keywords it is using. This is useful if you want to know what keywords your competitors are using.
2. Countries and languages you're interested in.
3. Whether you want adult content.
4. Whether you want to include the statistics for mobile search.
5a. See all keywords relating to your phrase or
5b. See only ideas containing your exact phrase.
6. Filter searches so that Ad Share, Local Monthly Searches, Global Monthly Searches, Competition, Estimated Average CPC or Search Share meet certain criteria. You'd need to see the tool to understand all the possibilities.
7. Select categories.
8. Select match type.
You can then download your keyword list to your computer in various formats.
This is a fairly limited keyword selection tool but not bad considering that it's free.
Wordtracker's Gtrends is another keyword selection tool which has a free version. This only gives one hundred related keywords but links with Google Trends and gives the number of competing pages and the number of actual visitors received from the number one listed site in Google each day. However, apart from the number of searches, you can only see the results of one keyword at a time which is a bit irritating and there's no way of exporting the data. The search results are solely based on US figures.