Performance Marketing Blog

Finding the best keywords to optimize your site for can take forever. Make sure you start with the right tools so you get good answers and use your time wisely. Try some of the most used keyword building tools and some of the others before coming up with your final keyword targeting strategy.

I have been reviewing some tools for an SEO project we are working on and thought I would share some of my initial findings. Our current need for this project is a tool that allows you to pull keywords via an API. A lot of my personal experience has been working with tools more along the lines of Hitwise (closer to Enterprise solution and $70K/yr last time I checked). In this case we don’t have that type of budget, who does nowadays?

Let’s start with the free tools first:

Here are some general SEO resource sites you should take a look at-

Name: UITEST

Purpose: End to end help in building and optimizing your website.

URL: http://uitest.com/en/analysis

When to use: Well it is a robust enough list that you can use these tools form the site planning stages all the way through to optimization and marketing, really the full life-cycle.

Price: Free

Keyword research tools-

Name: SEOBOOK

Purpose: This keyword suggestion tool is good for finding related search results to terms you want to target. It also provides semantically related phrases and has a handy CSV export option. Of course it’s bid prices are very useful if you want to target either high paying terms for targeting traffic or which terms you want to bid on in your ppc campaign.

URL: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook

When to use: Useful when launching a new site or when you just need some new ideas for targeting new keywords in order to optimize and existing site.

Price: Free

Name: WordTracker

Purpose: Find 100 related keywords to your search term of interest and get an estimate of their daily traffic volume.

URL: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

When to use: Anytime you need some quick info about related search terms.

Price: Free

Name: SEOCHAT

Purpose: Keyword suggestion tool for Google. Helps find relevant and popular related terms. Seems to be having some problems lately based on a Google Algorithm change.

URL: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-google

When to use: When you need a quick tool to find Google related results.

Price: Free

Name: Trellian

Purpose: Keyword discovery and multi-search engine benchmarking during keyword list build. Useful for building out multi-search engine lists and industry lists.

URL: www.keyworddiscovery.com

When to use: Useful for a new site during the first month of optimization, nice to have for 2 months (ongoing support)

Price: $69.95/month or $599.40/year

Name: Keyword Country

Purpose: Keyword discovery and competition benchmarking during site review of existing sites. This is a good tool for those people focused more on content development and who need help on how to choose anchor text. It is also useful for finding keywords with high Click Though Rates to predict results for Key Performance Indicators. The tool provides the ability to review competitor keywords and search engines that they competition is using. Keyword Country also shows number of pages on competitor’s sites using certain keywords so you can target content for future development.

URL: www.keywordcountry.com

When to use: Nice to have for content suggestions component during first 90 days. If you are a content heavy site then you may want this ongoing.

Price: $99 for 3 month

Name: WORDZe

Purpose: You may want to use this during keyword discovery phase when building a target keyword list as well as during link building strategy development. This tool can be useful to compare how your keyword optimization strategies might work across countries. Provides information on how hard it is to rank in top 10 for particular keywords as well as demographic data on users searching for top keywords (relevancy) . Also provides link rankings and suggested authority sites to submit links to as well as city by city breakdowns and industry analysis. This tool is helpful for seasonality review and optimization adjustments by time of year.

URL: www.wordze.com

When to use: Critical for first month, nice to have for remainder (ongoing support)

Price: $45/month

Name: Keyword Domination

Purpose: Useful for keyword discovery while building a target keyword list and comparing that list across languages. This resource has an enhanced international suggestion tool. This tool is useful for keyword suggestions that are imbedded in content and long-tail keywords that might not show up in other tools.

URL: www.keyworddomination.com

When to use: Nice to have for international component during first 30 days of an internationally relevant project.

Price: $97/month

I hope this is useful. Please let me know if you have any keyword building or targeting tool favorites of your own. Oh, and if you find a good tool that has an API for keyword suggestions and/or one that provides bid prices on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com please let me know.